This is not generally why senders say it can take a few days. The general reason is they can’t control whether messages they already sent will be delivered later by the recipient’s systems. In fact there’s no limit to the last time at which you might finally receive such messages.
Sometimes when I hear projection for jobs being automated away I look at my own colleagues and friend and feel skeptical. And then I read something like this…
LinkedIn is the worst as I get emails from them even though I don't have an account. I must have "unsubscribed" from them a bunch of times (or tried to) and I still get their bloody emails every time someone tries to search for my (non-existent) LinkedIn account or some such.
I've been automatically deleting all @linked.com emails for years. Only way to deal with them. Maybe it's better managed now, but good god, just stop sending your stupid emails already.
Ironically the only time I did have a (temporary) LinkedIn account was to find the contact of every C-level exec and other person in charge of a recruiting company that kept spamming me over both email and phone and didn't stop after repeated requests.
LinkedIn is absolutely atrocious for sending unwelcome emails. I actually filter them all, at this point I’m motivated by pure spite towards the kind of companies that think they’re entitled to my attention as and when they demand it.
If I want to know about things on LinkedIn I’ll look at LinkedIn, I don’t need their crap in my inbox too which is 80% irrelevant rubbish anyway. Email has the worst signal to noise ratio of any modern communication systems in use today, I’d send it the way of analogue TV if I could.
Why is it so easy to believe that there are incompetent fools in power who encourage tech debt and bureaucracy even though it's obviously bad for the business, and so hard to believe there are incompetent fools in power who are suspicious of people who don't look or act like them even though it's obviously bad for the business?
This has been posted a few times and while it's a good story I find the general root cause highly unlikely to be the case most of the time.
CAN-SPAM gives a 10-day window to honor the unsubscribe and if a marketing team can shovel more marketing your way for another ten days you'd better believe they will.
> if a marketing team can shovel more marketing your way for another ten days you'd better believe they will.
Only for crap marketing teams. At the point you ask you be removed you stop being a good lead. The entire point of an email newsletter is to nuture leads. Doing what you suggest they do would be the oppisite. And reduce their metrics therefore making them look worse. Why would anyone choose to make their metrics/KPIs look worse?
Not only that it increases the chances of spam reports and marketing 100% care about deliverability.
You're assuming rational behavior. Statistically speaking half the population has an IQ under 100¹.
There's an online big&tall clothing retailer who have a great site. Exactly what I wanted: I can search by size (my trouser size is often just above regular size stores' inventory and just below b&t stores' inventory), decent enough prices,² good sizing guides, even some variety in colors and styles. I was ready to become a regular customer.
On check out I was asked if I wanted to join their mailing list. I clicked no.
The next day I got a marketing email. I clicked the unsubscribe button.
The next day I got *another* marketing email. I called them up and made it clear that if I got another email they'd lost me as a customer forever and they'd better make damned sure they got me off their mailing list.
You can guess what came in the email the next day.
I marked them as spam and set up the kill it with fire rule in my gmail³ so that I'd never see another email from them again.
I tell this story mostly because it's not an atypical experience. You'd think people would know better than to do things like this, but you'd be thinking wrong. A lot of marketing people see email as a free way to reach prospects and don't seem to understand the negative consequences of irritating customers like this.
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1. That is assuming that IQ variation truly is a normal distribution. In all the critiques of IQ, whether it's actually normally distributed seems to never come up.
2. Which as anyone reading this who's big and/or tall will know, means far more than you folks near the center of the size bell curve pay for clothes. I'm going to break our code of silence for a moment and say that every time we buy clothes, us b&t people loathe you center of the bell curve–sized people with a passion.
3. Established because Avis doesn't even give an opt-out link in their crap marketing emails.
Regarding your first footnote, IQ is assumed to be a normal distribution since that is how it is defined: Measure a factor g of general intelligence, then translate its distribution of values onto a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. Since IQ is a relative measurement against the population, it can be distributed however one likes. That's not to say, though, that absolute intelligence (however one chooses to define it) is necessarily normally distributed.
I guess my biggest question is whether the distribution is symmetrical. I think mathematically¹, that if you do something like sum n values that are uniformly distributed from 1…k, you'll tend towards a bell curve as n ∞, so I have no reason to believe that you wouldn't get something like that with IQ tests, but I have a hard time convincing myself that it's necessarily so. Then again, whatever deviation from a pure normal distribution would probably not be dramatic and the median = 100 line would hold up regardless thanks to the definition of 100.
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1. I've taught basic stats in the past, but my own stats education is rudimentary since I avoided anything that even vaguely approached applied mathematics in my mathematical education.
Intelligence distribution may not be symmetrical. I don't think it is, in fact I'm not sure what that would even mean. High intelligence means doing some things faster and low intelligence means not being able to do some things at all. The only way to symmetry or otherwise is via a quantification which converts these things to a scalar measure, and then distribution becomes a tweakable property of the quantification when tested against a population.
And that's why IQ (not intelligence, they are not synonyms) is normally distributed. It is a tuned quantification, designed to be normally distributed. If it doesn't turn out that way, there is some divergence between the population it was tuned for and the sample you're measuring.
I used to get some credit card offer in the mail it seems like at least once a month. One time, I wrote a short note saying that I was tired of seeing their offer and would now never accept the card on principle and that their best bet was to stop sending them and hope I forget and put it in the prepaid return envelope and mailed it.
They stopped. I forgot. I got the card some years later and only remembered it was that one after having the card for some time.
Yes half the population has an IQ under 100 but only a third of adults have a college degree. You're assuming the make up of marketing departments mimics broader society which I'm sure it doesn't.
I went to a highly selective college for undergrad. It's really easy to assume that this is typical of the college population, which it isn't. And even among that highly selective population, it was really easy to spot a lot of irrational behaviors. Hell, if test results are to be believed, I'm in the top 1% of the population intelligence-wise and yet I still lost $20 to a shell-game con artist on the “L” and that's just the tip of the iceberg of my own irrational behavior.
I mean, dark patterns are all the rage nowadays in "good" marketing teams.
We don't know how this affect their KPI as it is most likely different for every mailing list, depending on customer base and other factors.
Using KPIs is a wonderful way of justifying neglecting common sense.
The issue is with email marketing the cost is basically zero to do a few more attempts at conversion and since you're already moving out of the potential lead pool throwing a few last second pitches your way is pretty low risk.
GDPR gives a 30 days window for erasure requests. I can't seem to find any time frames in the UK's law about e-mail marketing or in those for other EU countries for that matter.
That’s the right to full erasure. Revoking consent for processing your data for marketing purposes should be possible at any time and as easy as giving consent:
“The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.” (Article 7(3) GDPR)
That does not mean that you cannot take a few days to process the revocation, but it does mean that you should handle it as soon as possible and the burden is on you as data processor to ensure you still have valid (non-revoked) consent before sending another mail.
> if a marketing team can shovel more marketing your way for another ten days you'd better believe they will.
Yeah, this is flat out wrong. When you unsubscribe we want you out of there. You've already told us you are not a high value lead, and the hit we would get for email reputation is very much not worth it.
If you hit that unsubscribe link and you are not immediately unsubscribed, something is broken.
I don't care that it takes 10 days. What I want is to not get new spam that I have to constantly unsubscribe to. Systems should be forced to send you an initial approval/subscribe email to begin with. This alone would help reduce all of the email I get for other people who mistakingly use my email as theirs.
Absolutely. Contact information is provided with certain expectations of how it will be used. If I provide an email address for the purpose of receiving package tracking updates, it is absolutely unacceptable to use that email address for marketing. If I provide a phone number for 2FA (ignoring all the security flaws in that), it is absolutely unacceptable to use that phone number for marketing.
Misappropriating personal information for unapproved purposes is on the same level as misappropriating credit card numbers for unapproved purchases. Just because an entity has access to information does not mean that they are justified in using that information in any way possible.
Several EU countries require double opt-in (i.e. you have to confirm the opt-in by clicking a link you receive via e-mail before they can send you additional e-mails). Sounds like this is what you want?
Yes, to some degree. We need better email infrastructure to handle this type of thing. I can see there being situations where it can cause problem or friction.
What I do know is that what we have today is an absolute mess and it's horribly inefficient.
This sounds like an awesome idea, and I immediately began musing over the idea of a world in which it was globally illegal to send mass messages anywhere in the world without an initial opt-in.
Sadly, I immediately realized that if such a law was passed, the major email providers would all implement the opt-in check using a web-based system (as opposed to a fundamentally email-based one, on easily argued "convenience" and "accessibility" and "user experience" grounds), and thus achieve vendor lock-in.
In the end it would amount to another form of implicit censorship through badly managed filters and whatnot.
I think the ideal solution would be if it wasn't essentially free to send an email (meaning there is no incentive to not spam). If it cost $0.01 to send an email it would have no impact on normal people and businesses, but it would dramatically reduce the amount of untargeted spam.
Requiring a billing infrastructure makes everything hard.
Now I need to charge users before I let them sign up for an account, because if I send them a confirmation mail when they sign up, and then a couple password resets over the years and I've got more than a handful of users, it's going to be real money. Which isn't that hard, but users don't really want to pay $1 to join a forum or whatever.
The bigger problem becomes how do you actually tape a penny to an email? There's a lot of diversity in email providers (even if there's a lot of concentration at the top), and international payment flows are extra fun. Plus, a penny USD is a significant amount of money to people in many less wealthy nations.
And the whole thing is very decentralized, so good luck with adoption.
I don’t believe it’s necessarily evidence of racism that their work needed to be checked by UK/Scotland office. If the company hired dirt cheap offshore engineers, they would get crappy work, you get what you pay for.
There's a principle in US law at least, that political speech needs to be the least regulated. The cynical version is to view it as politicians write the laws, but it also prevents the politicians from writing laws that privilege incumbents even more than they are by virtue of being incumbent.
> This email group is monitored by two people in the banks offshore centre in Hyderabad. They worked super hard and always SMASHED their job; but holy crap it was soul crushing.
4-hour workweek and such books have taught Westerners to de-humanize Indians and give them the most menial jobs imaginable at next to nothing salaries
Many Indians have excellent skills and rise up in the corporate ladder. The CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet, among many other highly paid industry tech leaders, may disagree with your antiquated notions.
BTW, if you want to speak of dehumanization, perhaps taking a look at India's caste system would be interesting.
As far as I can tell from Western civilization, one of the core values in the modern era is that you have every opportunity to try and earn wealth based on your skills and talents the same as everybody else. The implementation of this system isn't perfect and can be argued about all day long, but the core value at the center of it is pretty solidly defined.
I think "few days" is also a sort of baked in phrase from the early days of large email lists.
I managed a multi-million member mailing list in the late 90s. It would take 24+ hours to send a single mailing, despite us writing our own multi-threaded SMTP senders, per-destination optimized number of concurrent connections (too many and you get blocked, too few and it's too slow), highly managed hard/soft bounces to keep the list clean, etc
Aside from the "day to deliver", it was still pretty common for mail providers to have deep SMTP queues that were very far away from real time. They would very commonly hold mail in batches and deliver them a couple of times a day.
So, we would say "a couple of days to unsubscribe" to account for all that. I noticed other large email lists using the same terminology.
Then, the smaller lists would sort of "cargo cult" this messaging because the lower expectations made their life easier.
My guess is that everyone held onto that as email delivery tech improved to give themselves more leeway, or sneak in a few extra "last" emails, etc.
This matches my experience that any UI that says "this may take a few minutes", usually only takes a couple of seconds on average hardware, or even if the actual computation is happening on the same server telling you it usually takes a few minutes.
Oh dear yes! Double digit hours to queue up the emails, DAYS for our rack of 1U Sun pizza boxes to send them. And sometimes we'd queue up five different campaigns at once to send out the following week.
CRM marketer here. The real reason most companies cite a time range for unsubscribes is to create a buffer in case their ETL breaks and no one realizes. 99.9% it’s instantaneous but they don’t want to make legal promises that could be broken under certain circumstances.
Our particular team always setup multiple alarms to catch system outages but you never know how quickly the service provider will resolve their bugs.
But the "software" gore of it all... Great story, even if it's been posted before. I listen to songs more than once also, and sometimes my appreciation/tastes changes enough for it to be novel again.
Obviously they have a creaky WTF-filled unsubscribe mechanism because they have no incentive to build a better one, regardless of how much simpler and cheaper it would be.
My job is to build and run email marketing systems. Even in modern enterprise mailing platforms it's remarkably easy for unsubscribe systems to break.
Here are the most common troubleshooting things that come up:
- Your email service may strip out the unique URL that unsubscribes you. In which case you may go to a blank unsubscribe page. If it's not well designed, you may think you are unsubscribing but really you submitted an empty form request.
- (We can't always do one-click unsubscribe anymore because some modern SPAM filters work by clicking every link in an email for you.)
- Similarly, the unsubscribe page can often be just a web form. Some blocking software like Ghostery may think it's a marketing form and straight up disable it.
- Some other team or department in the company set up their own email service for customers or leads without telling the marketing department and doesn't do anything to coordinate the opt-out process (This happens remarkably often.)
- The MOST COMMON reason unsubscribes don't work is some set of forwarding rules. Someone signed up on the website with the address for a mailing list, or a junk email that forwards it to their actual email address. We can't magically guess the right address to unsubscribe from (we had a case where 8 different people on a 15 person product team tried to unsubscribe the list, and one person on the team kept resubbing them every time).
From an outside perspective, it seems like your organization could very much do something about the last item. Make the unsubscribe link unique to each user. Then whether they click the link or hit reply 99.99% of the time, you have a way of uniquely identifying an individual. There's probably a lot going on under the surface though, since this seems like a pretty obvious approach.
> When they do it calls an antique web service that runs ‘somewhere’ at the bank. Honestly, it took me 3 weeks to find out where.
A bit of a non sequitur, but this part reminds me of a place I worked where there was an old computer terminal set up in the middle of the receptionist’s office, which was tiny, and you had to kind of scootch around it to get in. It was like that for an unknown number of years.
One day before I started working there a couple of smart fellers asked what it was for, and nobody knew, so they investigated and found it wasn’t plugged into anything except the electrical outlet in the wall. Even so, it took them a while to gather the courage to unplug it, because who knows what crazy systems the people before you have set up.
Epilogue: They moved it to a stairwell where it sat for another couple of years looking like the saddest computer in the world before it was finally hauled away. [^1]
That's no terminal, that's an entire computer you got there. Albeit a very sad one with a busted keyboard.
Doesn't need to be plugged into anything but electricity, and probably didn't even have one of your fancy Ethernet jacks. No Wi-Fi either; that hadn't been invented yet. Just a standalone machine that did what it could, until it was so cruelly abandoned.
I always love hearing stories about long forgotten computers / servers that just silently hum away in the background for years. Kind of reminds me of the story about the old Novell server that ended up behind a wall after some construction [0].
Anecdotally I have found businesses are miraculously efficient at things that benefit them (signing up for things, transferring money into banks, making payments) and need “extra time” for anything that is a problem for them in any way (processing “unsubscribe”, issuing refunds, transferring money from banks, cancelling accounts).
I feel like the only solution is a law that simply requires businesses to make it equally easy to do something as it is to undo it (especially for things like being able to “click here” to enroll but “on hold for 45 minutes” to cancel...give me a break). Some states are getting there.
I have a thousand similar stories (my comment history will turn up several of them).
For context, in the late 90s, I started at "the first iteration of" Frontier Communications, not long after it transformed from Rochester Telephone and Telegraph[0], before its acquisition by both Global Crossing and Citizens (I went with the Global Crossing side).
We were a ~20,000, no 5,000, no 15,000, no 10,000, well, somewhere in there depending on what part of any given year over the 2 decades that I worked for the variety of companies that started, for me, there.
On one occasion, we had a process for collecting tariffs. That term isn't exactly right, but it describes it best. Basically, when a phone call is placed in the US, if it does not terminate with your carrier, your carrier is paying a fee to another carrier, or to a long-distance provider[1]. For call termination purposes, Global Crossing was almost always the long-distance provider, not the local provider[2] and we were paid an amount by one of the larger players that doesn't go unnoticed when it's missing from the balance sheet.
The finer details are in a previous comment of mine, but the end result was my discovery that the process for getting paid was tied to a decade old desktop PC sitting on a shelf in the main data-center with a USR modem attached to it which was recently moved from Green Bay, WI to Detroit, MI (and none of the original staff came along with it). It was sitting at a boot screen asking for hard disk parameters. I reported to a VP at the time who came to know me as the guy to go to for the strange stuff, and having spent my teens building PCs and inputting those parameters I recognized label with the odd acronyms/numbers on it as the parameters it was complaining about -- clearly the last guy noticed the dead battery and the label maker, not a replacement battery, was available.
Up until a few years before I left, the "trouble-ticketing" system used for all customer and IT support was purchased, source code and all from a bankrupt ISV[3]. It used a Java fat client that talked SOAP, I think, to the worlds most normalized, awful performing database I've ever encountered. I saw queries coming from this app where the UI indicated date ranges like "1/1/2003 - 1/1/2005" and the app would spit out a query with "BETWEEN" statements for each day, with nested parenthesis. It was clearly the worlds ugliest ORM, and trying to make sense out of the over 2,000 tables that made up the application was, barely possible.
To resolve this grief, our internal development team undertook writing a web UI for it. At a certain point, I want to say we had twice as many physical hosts operating our internal ticketing system than we did hosting everything we exposed externally, and not just "more boxes" but the most powerful hardware in the DC.
There seems to be a lot of sentiment, here, that if this were a "sign-up" process, it'd be far faster/better.
Anecdotally, my experience leads me to think this is more "laziness/enterprise inertia/large-company edge-cases" than it is "it's not bringing in money, so we'll do it the dumbest way imaginable". At least, I know for a period of time large pieces of the on-boarding had the appearance to the customer of being highly automated, but at the end of the day, it was a Clarify ticket passed between several hands who made phone calls/sent faxes. They'd certainly allocate larger staff to something that brings in revenue, but anything regulatory-related, at least where I was (and probably similar in all Telecom -- almost certainly more obnoxious in anything banking-related) was taken very seriously.
The fact that they have contract staff in India handling the process manually says two things to me: (1) somewhere, there's a fine/other clear risk if t...
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadOr bullshit jobs.
I've been automatically deleting all @linked.com emails for years. Only way to deal with them. Maybe it's better managed now, but good god, just stop sending your stupid emails already.
Ironically the only time I did have a (temporary) LinkedIn account was to find the contact of every C-level exec and other person in charge of a recruiting company that kept spamming me over both email and phone and didn't stop after repeated requests.
If I want to know about things on LinkedIn I’ll look at LinkedIn, I don’t need their crap in my inbox too which is 80% irrelevant rubbish anyway. Email has the worst signal to noise ratio of any modern communication systems in use today, I’d send it the way of analogue TV if I could.
well you had me until here. a perfect parable of tech debt and unwieldy bureaucratic quagmire... except it was racism the whole time. what a waste.
CAN-SPAM gives a 10-day window to honor the unsubscribe and if a marketing team can shovel more marketing your way for another ten days you'd better believe they will.
the first email I get after I unsubscribe will be reported as SPAM
Only for crap marketing teams. At the point you ask you be removed you stop being a good lead. The entire point of an email newsletter is to nuture leads. Doing what you suggest they do would be the oppisite. And reduce their metrics therefore making them look worse. Why would anyone choose to make their metrics/KPIs look worse?
Not only that it increases the chances of spam reports and marketing 100% care about deliverability.
There's an online big&tall clothing retailer who have a great site. Exactly what I wanted: I can search by size (my trouser size is often just above regular size stores' inventory and just below b&t stores' inventory), decent enough prices,² good sizing guides, even some variety in colors and styles. I was ready to become a regular customer.
On check out I was asked if I wanted to join their mailing list. I clicked no.
The next day I got a marketing email. I clicked the unsubscribe button.
The next day I got *another* marketing email. I called them up and made it clear that if I got another email they'd lost me as a customer forever and they'd better make damned sure they got me off their mailing list.
You can guess what came in the email the next day.
I marked them as spam and set up the kill it with fire rule in my gmail³ so that I'd never see another email from them again.
I tell this story mostly because it's not an atypical experience. You'd think people would know better than to do things like this, but you'd be thinking wrong. A lot of marketing people see email as a free way to reach prospects and don't seem to understand the negative consequences of irritating customers like this.
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1. That is assuming that IQ variation truly is a normal distribution. In all the critiques of IQ, whether it's actually normally distributed seems to never come up.
2. Which as anyone reading this who's big and/or tall will know, means far more than you folks near the center of the size bell curve pay for clothes. I'm going to break our code of silence for a moment and say that every time we buy clothes, us b&t people loathe you center of the bell curve–sized people with a passion.
3. Established because Avis doesn't even give an opt-out link in their crap marketing emails.
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1. I've taught basic stats in the past, but my own stats education is rudimentary since I avoided anything that even vaguely approached applied mathematics in my mathematical education.
And that's why IQ (not intelligence, they are not synonyms) is normally distributed. It is a tuned quantification, designed to be normally distributed. If it doesn't turn out that way, there is some divergence between the population it was tuned for and the sample you're measuring.
They stopped. I forgot. I got the card some years later and only remembered it was that one after having the card for some time.
I told them what to do, and it worked!
Using KPIs is a wonderful way of justifying neglecting common sense.
“The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.” (Article 7(3) GDPR)
That does not mean that you cannot take a few days to process the revocation, but it does mean that you should handle it as soon as possible and the burden is on you as data processor to ensure you still have valid (non-revoked) consent before sending another mail.
Yeah, this is flat out wrong. When you unsubscribe we want you out of there. You've already told us you are not a high value lead, and the hit we would get for email reputation is very much not worth it.
If you hit that unsubscribe link and you are not immediately unsubscribed, something is broken.
Misappropriating personal information for unapproved purposes is on the same level as misappropriating credit card numbers for unapproved purchases. Just because an entity has access to information does not mean that they are justified in using that information in any way possible.
What I do know is that what we have today is an absolute mess and it's horribly inefficient.
Sadly, I immediately realized that if such a law was passed, the major email providers would all implement the opt-in check using a web-based system (as opposed to a fundamentally email-based one, on easily argued "convenience" and "accessibility" and "user experience" grounds), and thus achieve vendor lock-in.
In the end it would amount to another form of implicit censorship through badly managed filters and whatnot.
Now I need to charge users before I let them sign up for an account, because if I send them a confirmation mail when they sign up, and then a couple password resets over the years and I've got more than a handful of users, it's going to be real money. Which isn't that hard, but users don't really want to pay $1 to join a forum or whatever.
The bigger problem becomes how do you actually tape a penny to an email? There's a lot of diversity in email providers (even if there's a lot of concentration at the top), and international payment flows are extra fun. Plus, a penny USD is a significant amount of money to people in many less wealthy nations.
And the whole thing is very decentralized, so good luck with adoption.
Any way to lay down the hammer as a dual US / EEA (basically lots of EU legislation apply) citizen?
4-hour workweek and such books have taught Westerners to de-humanize Indians and give them the most menial jobs imaginable at next to nothing salaries
BTW, if you want to speak of dehumanization, perhaps taking a look at India's caste system would be interesting.
As far as I can tell from Western civilization, one of the core values in the modern era is that you have every opportunity to try and earn wealth based on your skills and talents the same as everybody else. The implementation of this system isn't perfect and can be argued about all day long, but the core value at the center of it is pretty solidly defined.
I managed a multi-million member mailing list in the late 90s. It would take 24+ hours to send a single mailing, despite us writing our own multi-threaded SMTP senders, per-destination optimized number of concurrent connections (too many and you get blocked, too few and it's too slow), highly managed hard/soft bounces to keep the list clean, etc
Aside from the "day to deliver", it was still pretty common for mail providers to have deep SMTP queues that were very far away from real time. They would very commonly hold mail in batches and deliver them a couple of times a day.
So, we would say "a couple of days to unsubscribe" to account for all that. I noticed other large email lists using the same terminology.
Then, the smaller lists would sort of "cargo cult" this messaging because the lower expectations made their life easier.
My guess is that everyone held onto that as email delivery tech improved to give themselves more leeway, or sneak in a few extra "last" emails, etc.
Those were interesting times to live through.
Our particular team always setup multiple alarms to catch system outages but you never know how quickly the service provider will resolve their bugs.
Too many companies think they're being like-supa-smart in having multiple mailing lists so you have to unsubscribe 7 times.
First email: Unsubscribe.
Second email: Select all from sender, mark as spam.
And if I really really definitely did not sign up for it, I "report spam" on the first email I receive.
This is utter baloney. Unsubscribe requests do not need to be complicated or unreliable.
Here are the most common troubleshooting things that come up:
- Your email service may strip out the unique URL that unsubscribes you. In which case you may go to a blank unsubscribe page. If it's not well designed, you may think you are unsubscribing but really you submitted an empty form request.
- (We can't always do one-click unsubscribe anymore because some modern SPAM filters work by clicking every link in an email for you.)
- Similarly, the unsubscribe page can often be just a web form. Some blocking software like Ghostery may think it's a marketing form and straight up disable it.
- Some other team or department in the company set up their own email service for customers or leads without telling the marketing department and doesn't do anything to coordinate the opt-out process (This happens remarkably often.)
- The MOST COMMON reason unsubscribes don't work is some set of forwarding rules. Someone signed up on the website with the address for a mailing list, or a junk email that forwards it to their actual email address. We can't magically guess the right address to unsubscribe from (we had a case where 8 different people on a 15 person product team tried to unsubscribe the list, and one person on the team kept resubbing them every time).
A bit of a non sequitur, but this part reminds me of a place I worked where there was an old computer terminal set up in the middle of the receptionist’s office, which was tiny, and you had to kind of scootch around it to get in. It was like that for an unknown number of years.
One day before I started working there a couple of smart fellers asked what it was for, and nobody knew, so they investigated and found it wasn’t plugged into anything except the electrical outlet in the wall. Even so, it took them a while to gather the courage to unplug it, because who knows what crazy systems the people before you have set up.
Epilogue: They moved it to a stairwell where it sat for another couple of years looking like the saddest computer in the world before it was finally hauled away. [^1]
[^1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
Doesn't need to be plugged into anything but electricity, and probably didn't even have one of your fancy Ethernet jacks. No Wi-Fi either; that hadn't been invented yet. Just a standalone machine that did what it could, until it was so cruelly abandoned.
Great image by the way.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server...
I feel like the only solution is a law that simply requires businesses to make it equally easy to do something as it is to undo it (especially for things like being able to “click here” to enroll but “on hold for 45 minutes” to cancel...give me a break). Some states are getting there.
Go ahead and send me an email; blocking the sender is one click in my email client.
Go ahead and charge this temporary credit card; I can shut it off whenever I like.
Etc.
For context, in the late 90s, I started at "the first iteration of" Frontier Communications, not long after it transformed from Rochester Telephone and Telegraph[0], before its acquisition by both Global Crossing and Citizens (I went with the Global Crossing side).
We were a ~20,000, no 5,000, no 15,000, no 10,000, well, somewhere in there depending on what part of any given year over the 2 decades that I worked for the variety of companies that started, for me, there.
On one occasion, we had a process for collecting tariffs. That term isn't exactly right, but it describes it best. Basically, when a phone call is placed in the US, if it does not terminate with your carrier, your carrier is paying a fee to another carrier, or to a long-distance provider[1]. For call termination purposes, Global Crossing was almost always the long-distance provider, not the local provider[2] and we were paid an amount by one of the larger players that doesn't go unnoticed when it's missing from the balance sheet.
The finer details are in a previous comment of mine, but the end result was my discovery that the process for getting paid was tied to a decade old desktop PC sitting on a shelf in the main data-center with a USR modem attached to it which was recently moved from Green Bay, WI to Detroit, MI (and none of the original staff came along with it). It was sitting at a boot screen asking for hard disk parameters. I reported to a VP at the time who came to know me as the guy to go to for the strange stuff, and having spent my teens building PCs and inputting those parameters I recognized label with the odd acronyms/numbers on it as the parameters it was complaining about -- clearly the last guy noticed the dead battery and the label maker, not a replacement battery, was available.
Up until a few years before I left, the "trouble-ticketing" system used for all customer and IT support was purchased, source code and all from a bankrupt ISV[3]. It used a Java fat client that talked SOAP, I think, to the worlds most normalized, awful performing database I've ever encountered. I saw queries coming from this app where the UI indicated date ranges like "1/1/2003 - 1/1/2005" and the app would spit out a query with "BETWEEN" statements for each day, with nested parenthesis. It was clearly the worlds ugliest ORM, and trying to make sense out of the over 2,000 tables that made up the application was, barely possible.
To resolve this grief, our internal development team undertook writing a web UI for it. At a certain point, I want to say we had twice as many physical hosts operating our internal ticketing system than we did hosting everything we exposed externally, and not just "more boxes" but the most powerful hardware in the DC.
There seems to be a lot of sentiment, here, that if this were a "sign-up" process, it'd be far faster/better.
Anecdotally, my experience leads me to think this is more "laziness/enterprise inertia/large-company edge-cases" than it is "it's not bringing in money, so we'll do it the dumbest way imaginable". At least, I know for a period of time large pieces of the on-boarding had the appearance to the customer of being highly automated, but at the end of the day, it was a Clarify ticket passed between several hands who made phone calls/sent faxes. They'd certainly allocate larger staff to something that brings in revenue, but anything regulatory-related, at least where I was (and probably similar in all Telecom -- almost certainly more obnoxious in anything banking-related) was taken very seriously.
The fact that they have contract staff in India handling the process manually says two things to me: (1) somewhere, there's a fine/other clear risk if t...