What is ‘no email address’ and why can’t it be reversed?

If you have chosen to not send the petition…

this enables a further (dangerous) option on the “Petition Options” tab.

Notice that the “confirm signatures” option is now disabled as is the “Display Opt-In checkbox” option on the Display Options tab.

The “Don’t collect email address” option does exactly what it implies, there will be no email address field displayed in the petition.

This was a feature request and has some serious implications;

• Since the database requires a unique email address for each signature, once you start collecting data with no email address, you can’t reverse that. Otherwise the database would be full of empty email addresses which are (obviously) not unique
• To give them some legitimacy, petitions sent to a target (e.g. your mayor) come from the signer@their-email-address. If we don’t have their email address then sending to a target is not allowed.
• No email address also means there can be no optin to a mailing list

One of the principles of the SpeakOut! plugin is to ensure that petitions have high integrity so that the target can’t dismiss a petition as being flawed simply because it came via the SpeakOut! plugin.