Hi @mikevh,
first and foremost, you are not the first and will not be the last person encountering this issue. And let me tell you, there is no “perfect” way, but a couple of feasible solutions.
Coming with Mautic 5, you will be able to Transactional Mails to contacts having a DNC. But until we have a stable Mautic 5 release, this is my solution:
I manage unsubscribe through an unsubscribe-Campaign. I do not use the default unsubscribe system by Mautic, but rather have a Link to selfmade landingpage in the footer of each email.
The unsubscribe-campaign start from an “All Contacts” segment and just waits for a pagevisit from said email footer to that selfmade landingpage. If someone clicks the link, my campaign actions start rolling.
Mostly they consist of adding Tags like “Unsubscribe” which affects my segments or directly removing the contact from segments, but that differs from system to system and setup to setup.
I hope that might gave you some inspiration on how to tackle this issue.
Leon