We apologize for the gap in communication, but site owners started getting notifications that emails were being unsubscribed from form notifications since October 9th. Here’s the github pull request:
The way it works is that when someone clicks on the unsubscribe link, the email that is being unsubscribed will be sent an unsubscribe confirmation email, with the owner of the site BCC’ed.
This was originally implemented to satisfy the CAN-SPAM laws around e-mail privacy and anti-spam measures. If we had waited to implement the unsub link, email delivery rates would have suffered for everyone. Since this was implemented in haste, we failed to communicate it broadly in our typical marketing channels.
This should have been communicated via a Since you’ve been gone, and maybe a blog post, but somewhere along the way the wires got cut/dropped. We sincerely apologize for the miscommunication! You can test this functionality out to see if it covers all scenarios you’ve highlighted.