Emergency contacts

Emergency contacts are reusable across hikes, and you can choose different contacts for different plans. When you add a new contact, HikeRuleOne.com sends them a confirmation email. They must confirm before they can receive hike start, update, finish, or overdue notifications.

Unverified contacts may still appear in your contact list and can be assigned to a hike, but they will not receive emails until they confirm. The app shows a warning when unverified contacts are selected so you know notification delivery is not complete yet.

Existing contacts are protected against accidental duplicates. You cannot add the same email twice, and email aliases such as name+tag@gmail.com are treated as the same address as name@gmail.com. Recently deleted contacts also cannot be re-added with the same email for 24 hours.

Every hike notification email after the first verification email includes an opt-out link. If a contact opts out, they stop receiving all future hike emails immediately, even for a hike they were previously assigned to.

Opted-out contacts remain visible to you for audit and history, but they cannot be selected for future hikes. Their card shows an Opted out badge with a red dot. The only action available to the hiker is deleting the contact.

If that person later wants updates again, add them as a new emergency contact and have them verify again. HikeRuleOne.com does not let the hiker silently re-enable an opted-out contact, because consent must come from the contact.