Hi @os72. That was an unfortunate incident
The auto-unsubscribes on permanent failures are standard behaviour for list management because repeatedly sending to known-bad addresses costs you money and can damage your sender reputation score meaning your emails can fail to get to the good addresses!
Ghost’s unsubscribe issue was not an isolated incident as can be seen from the discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435916.
It appears Mailgun has worked to keep it from being a problem on their side by stopping these users ending up on their suppression lists. On Ghost’s side there needs to be some manual intervention to re-subscribe the failed members, I’ve detailed the steps below (if you’re a Ghost(Pro) customer this has already been done for you):
If you view the details for one of the failed sends in Mailgun you will be able to see an email-id
like this:
Make a note of it then connect to your Ghost instances database. From there you can query to make sure there is correlation between the selected members and the failed members in Mailgun (replacing <email-id>
with the value noted above):
select
email, subscribed
from members
left join email_recipients on members.id = email_recipients.member_id
where email_recipients.email_id = "<email-id>"
and email_recipients.failed_at is not null;
If that correlates then you can re-subscribe the members that failed for that email:
update members
left join email_recipients on members.id = email_recipients.member_id
set subscribed = true
where email_recipients.email_id = "<email-id>"
and email_recipients.failed_at is not null;