Hi!

I'm a bit confused about the way itchio handles email addresses and a creator's ability to send emails to people who bought/own your work.

Under the Payments tab in your Dashboard, it is clearly stated that you're not allowed to use the adresses listed their for any other purpose than to clear support issues regarding payments and that under no circumstances are you allowed to add these addresses to any kind of mailing lists, without their explicit consent.

What confuses me, is that under the "Interact" tab of any specific project, you have the option to send out emails about basically anything, to everyone who owns your game.  How exactly is that different from just using the email addresses you see under the Payments tab?

To be clear, I don't want to use these, I just would like some clarification about the difference and where and how users are asked to opt into being added to this lists.

If you use the option on the Interact tab, Itch.io sends the email for you. They limit how many emails you can send out, and they include an unsubscribe link so people can stop getting emails from a certain game if they don't want them. Itch doesn't want you to go outside that system and send your own emails directly because then you might violate CAN-SPAM or GDPR, and people might not want to use the site anymore if developers add them to random mailing lists or sell their info.