Well,I just looked, and all my accounts say VIP member and my email address under them (on the Reward Summary page). And I went to Email Preferences for one them, and I don't see anything called opt-in or opt-out.
Do/did you see VIP member and your email address at the top right (of the same page that has your Rewards Summary) for each of your programs (before you reset them)?
It sounds like their system had a problem communicating with your email, for whatever reason. I suspect if anything it may have been limited to your email domain (the Whoever.com part) and/or who runs that. FYI, my email domain is one the many subsidiaries of aol.com (ie, it's not @aol.com) but it's run by AOL.com and my email login page says aol.com). If my (administered-by-AOL) email domain is having communication issues at a given moment, it typically is affecting all of AOL.com too.
And, furthermore, if it's not tied to a particular email domain (that someone else shares with you), then it wouldn't likely happen to anyone else at the same time. So everyone else just checking once, that may not achieve anything. You should always check every time you log in whether it still says "VIP member" and shows your email address at the upper right of the Rewards Summary page.
See, without finding anything that says "opt-in" or "opt-out", I see no evidence that RN just changed their system, I just see evidence that they had a temporary (even if unexplained) problem communicating with your email (which could have been either at your end or at the end or in the interface between the two), and the main issue is that they don't try long enough before booting you out of VIP status due to (their perception of) lost email contact. The policy on failed communications could have been in effect for a long time now, but if you hadn't run into a failed communications problem you presumably wouldn't have looked it up.
Last edited by sdsearch; Sep 17, 2017 at 7:09 pm