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Does Itch give your email to partners for marketing purposes? How does my Itch email keep getting put on these mailing lists?

A topic by no fun created 2 days ago Views: 148 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 3
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Before you get all uppity, I'm talking about these:

Now I hear you say, "It's because you bought, downloaded, or otherwise interacted with or supported this developer and/or their game," and no, I have not. "You may've forgot you had," no I did not, I've thoroughly checked through my activity. I've no form of previous interaction with these developers or games whatsoever.

I get probably two to three emails similar to this a month. From a developer I don't know, about a game I've never played.

You can unsubscribe from them, but you only unsubscribe from that specific developer's mailing list, not all communications like this.

I've gone so far as to reach out to a few of these developers over time to ask how they got my email, and the responses have been mostly similar confusion. As far as they've been concerned, I was on their own curated email lists, despite having never touched their game in my life.

The only thing I can think of are bundles. If you buy a bundle— one with a thousand items— is your private email put on every single one of these developers' email lists? And is there no way to not have that happen to even remove yourself from all of these new lists you're on?

Oh I forgot: I also know it's not just past emails, either. Because I very recently just changed my email and gave Itch a unique email specifically. That email is somehow getting hit now, even though I did not have that email associated with my account before a few weeks ago.

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As others have mentioned, the email isn't coming from an external developer account, but from Itch.

The system is supposed to work like this:

If I'm a developer, I can send a message to everyone who owns my game. The message is sent through Itch, which is why you'll receive an email from Itch at the email address associated with your Itch account at that time.

I recommend reading this post:

https://itch.io/t/1856548/how-do-i-turn-off-email-notifications-for-games-i-have...

https://itch.io/t/859194/questions-regarding-emails-to-people-who-purchased-a-ga...

In your settings, you have an option to download all the information Itch has about your account. If you download it, you should be able to see a list of all the games associated with your account, and I'm sure those games/developers will appear there. It's most likely due to the purchase of a bundle, but if you think it was a mistake, you should try contacting support.

Thanks for the breakdown. My concern is its the bundles, though. I don't consider an item in a bundle as me engaging with that specific developer, but now I'm on potentially hundreds of mailing lists.

Do you know if there's a way to remove myself from this sort of list in bulk?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think all those emails belong to the "New uploads are added to something I bought or follow" category, which you can disable in your preferences.

https://itch.io/user/settings/email-notifications

That's been disabled for ages, so that can't be it. :(


(+1)

It is this feature https://itch.io/docs/creators/interact

And that feature works for people that do not even have an Itch account. For those it would be the only method of updating them about new content, I guess.

But apparantly, some developers actually join big bundles to send such mails.

Anyway, you do not need to interact with a game to be put on the mailing list. You need to own it. If it is in your library under the purchased items, you are automatically on such a list. I am not sure if I misremember, but it could be that big bundles are supposed to be configured in a way, that you would need to manually add the items from the bundle to your library, for that mailing list thing to trigger. Maybe that changed or maybe the bundle was not configured properly.

Or maybe you did add the games to your library, either manually or by a script. Some older discussions about that issue mention people adding games from big bundles via script. But that's beside the point actually. The mailing list feature is active for single purchases as well, with no way of opting out before you get the first mail.

Thank you!! This has to be it. I thought I was going crazy.

I'm annoyed I can't bulk unsubscribe, especially since it's through Itch, so they know all the lists my email's added to. Someone needs to get Itch's attention with this, it feels like a spam loophole to get around some countries' opt-out-by-default solicitation laws.

Anyway, this helps and breaks it down for me, thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

The e-mail comes from itch.io rather than the game's creator directly, so at least there is no indication that your e-mail address has been leaked to them. They are sending the message through itch.io's interface.

Those e-mails should only be sent to buyers/owners of the game in question, though. If you really do not own that product, it looks to me like something is going wrong but you may have to open a support ticket.