👤Contacts & Companies

Bulk Email, Unsubscribes and POPIA

Emailing several contacts at once, and the opt-out rules that come with it.

What this is

Select several contacts on the Contacts page, pick an email template, and send to all of them at once — each personalised with that contact's own name and company. Every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link, and anyone who uses it is skipped automatically from then on.

Why the unsubscribe link isn't optional

POPIA section 69 governs direct marketing by electronic communication in South Africa. Among other things, a data subject must be able to object to receiving it, and you have to give them a reasonable opportunity to do so. An email campaign with no way out is not a style choice — it's a compliance problem.

There's a practical reason too. Gmail and Outlook both look for a proper unsubscribe mechanism when deciding whether your mail is legitimate. Every bulk email from Allsorts CRM includes the `List-Unsubscribe` header those providers use to show their own one-click Unsubscribe button, which meaningfully improves the chance your mail reaches an inbox at all.

When to use bulk email — and when not to

Reasonable: a price change your customers need to know about, a seasonal offer to people who've bought before, an announcement relevant to the list you're sending it to.

Not reasonable: a bought list, contacts scraped from somewhere, or people who gave you their details for one specific purpose and are now getting something unrelated. POPIA cares about whether you had a lawful basis to contact them, and no amount of unsubscribe links fixes a list you shouldn't have had.

How to send

Go to Contacts and tick the contacts you want.
Choose a template from the dropdown that appears.
Click Send.

You'll get a summary: how many sent, how many were skipped for having no email address, how many were skipped because they'd unsubscribed, and how many failed.

Templates support `{{firstName}}`, `{{lastName}}` and `{{company}}`, filled in per recipient.

You need your own SMTP connected — bulk email is never sent from a shared address, and your signature and Reply-To are applied so replies come back to you.

Limits, and why they exist

Up to 200 contacts per send, with a short pause between each message. Firing hundreds of emails at an SMTP server as fast as possible is the quickest way to get your account rate-limited or flagged as a spam source. For a bigger list, send in batches.

What happens when someone unsubscribes

They click the link (or their email client's Unsubscribe button) and are opted out immediately — no login, no confirmation step, no "are you sure". Opting out must never be harder than opting in.
Their contact record gets a clear Unsubscribed banner with the date, and a note is added to their timeline so you can see it happened.
They show an 🚫 Unsubscribed badge in the contacts list.
Every future bulk send skips them automatically — nobody has to remember.

Unsubscribe links stay valid indefinitely. Someone may act on an email from two years ago, and that has to still work.

What you can still send them

An opt-out covers direct marketing. It doesn't stop you emailing that person individually about their own business with you — an invoice, a quote, an answer to their enquiry. Those aren't marketing, and the CRM doesn't block them.

If someone unsubscribed by mistake

There's a This was a mistake — clear it link on their record. Use it only for a genuine error, such as a colleague testing the link. Clearing a flag in your own CRM is not the same as that person consenting to hear from you again — if in doubt, ask them.