What a topic does | AgentsMail.io Documentation

A topic is a lasting editorial theme — freelancing, agentic — that a reader can decline on its own. Declining a topic does not unsubscribe anybody: the contact keeps receiving everything else. Without topics, the only exit is total. A reader who came for one subject and receives three campaigns about another has a single button, and that button costs you the whole contact.

How you use one

Topics belong to the organization, not to a list: an editorial line crosses lists. You create them in Settings → Topics, and the name is unique within the organization. A campaign carries zero or one topic. So does a sequence. There is no multi-topic: with several, neither you nor the reader could tell what a refusal excludes. For the reader to be able to decline, the email has to offer the link. Put {{topicOptOutUrl}} where you want it in the template — a second link next to the unsubscribe one:

html

<a href="{{unsubscribeUrl}}">Unsubscribe</a> ·
<a href="{{topicOptOutUrl}}">No more emails about this topic</a>

Both act in one click: landing on the page is the answer. No preference screen, no form.

Nothing carries the shortcode for you. Gallery templates and default content deliberately leave {{topicOptOutUrl}} out — a shared template that carried it would break every campaign sent without a topic. You add it to your own template the day you start using topics.

What it excludes, and when

A refusal is checked at send time, not when you pick the audience. A contact who declined the topic is dropped from the recipients, and in a sequence the contact leaves the journey: the remaining steps never go out. Which means the count shown before sending can be higher than the number of emails actually sent. That gap is the refusals.

What refuses, and why

Two situations, two different answers — you get a warning when you lose something, an error when the recipient would receive something broken.

Situation	What happens
Campaign has a topic, content has no `{{topicOptOutUrl}}`	Warning. The email is valid and goes out with its legal unsubscribe link. Only the topic exit is missing.
Content has `{{topicOptOutUrl}}`, campaign has no topic	Sending is refused. The variable would render empty and the recipient would get a dead link. Pick a topic, or remove the shortcode.
A sequence step carries `{{topicOptOutUrl}}` and the sequence has no topic	Publishing is refused, naming the steps at fault.
Removing the topic from a published sequence whose steps carry the shortcode	Refused. Open a draft, remove the shortcode, publish — or keep a topic.

Deleting a topic that is still carried by a campaign or a sequence is refused too, and the message names them. Deleting one that nothing uses is final: the refusals people expressed are lost, and those people start receiving that topic again.

What it is not

A topic is not a tag. You put tags on contacts — positive segmentation, "who is this person". A topic refusal is put by the recipient — "what this person no longer wants". Two authorities on one table would end badly: an import that rewrites tags would erase refusals. A topic is not targeting either. A tag or a segment says who you send to; the topic is an exclusion applied on top of that. And it never replaces the legal unsubscribe. The List-Unsubscribe headers required by Gmail and Yahoo keep pointing at the one-click route that unsubscribes completely. A topic refusal is an extra choice, never a substitute.