One of our key concerns at MailBuild has always been ensuring that every subscriber has given their permission to be emailed. Given those standards, we recently decided that we needed to make a small change to the 'forward to a friend' feature.

Until now, we reported on both the people who forwarded, and the addresses they forwarded your campaigns to. Although we certainly didn't add these friends to a list or let you export them, we did expose their details to you. We also were not making it clear on the Forward to a Friend page that your friend's details were actually being captured.

Although this has never caused any issues or complaints so far, it's clearly not best practice, so we have now removed the display of people receiving forwarded emails. Instead, you'll now see which subscribers forwarded your email and how many people they forwarded it to. This change has also been applied to any previous campaigns you've sent.

We know how interesting (and fun!) it can be to see who is getting your campaigns forwarded to them, but individual's details were being exposed without their permission to the campaign sender.

We need to put the privacy of these people above anything else. The best way to take full advantage of the 'forward to a friend' feature may be to add a prominent link in each email encouraging new subscribers to sign up, then link right to the subscribe form on your site.

That way, you will know they actually are interested, and you have their full permission to send them email in the future.