Resubscribing members via import

Using Ghost
1

We have some important comms that we need to send to all of our (paid) members, however a subset have unsubscribed from emails.

According to the Import Members documentation (and Resubscribe Members?) it should be possible to resubscribe members via import:

Importing existing members

  • subscribed_to_emails=true → email subscription preferences will be left alone, unless they were previously unsubscribed from all.

However in our testing this doesn’t work. After the import the member is still not subscribed to any newsletters. We have ensured that the Subscribe new members on signup setting is enabled for the intended newsletter.

We are on Ghost 6.5.1 so perhaps we should upgrade to 6.9.1and re-test but hoping I could get some broader perspective on this activity. Is this the correct way to achieve what we’re after?

2

Update - we upgraded our Staging site to 9.6.1 but this issue still remains. Importing an existing member does with subscribed_to_emails=true does not resubscribe that user to default newsletters.

Perhaps I need to report a bug?

3

According to the actual code, when importing members, if the member exists and not subscribed to any newsletters, it assumes that they unsubscribed from them.

// If member does not have any subscriptions, assume they have previously unsubscribed
// and do not re-subscribe them
if (!existingNewsletters.length && memberValues.subscribed) {
  memberValues.subscribed = false;
}

So, apparently re-importing members is not a way of re-subscribing them. And this looks intentional, since there is a clear comment about that.

4

Thanks - that makes it pretty clear. The documentation sets the wrong expectation in my opinion.