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Ask HN: Why Does It Take "10 Days" To Be Unsubscribed From Marketing Emails?

3 points by dylangs1030 ↗ HN
I went through another round of unsubscribing myself from annoying marketing emails today. When I did so, the site in question's confirmation page said to allow 10 days for the effect to take place. Does anyone know why this is?

8 comments

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gfosco
I believe it's done to allow time for any emails currently in transit, or already scheduled for delivery. They could be using one or more 3rd-party marketing tools, or multiple servers and databases which also need to be processed; They may do this manually.
dylangs1030
Good point, I hadn't thought of that. The case that prompted this question is a large enough company (multinational) that I could see them outsourcing mailing list subscriptions to a third party.
mailslot
As someone who's built systems like these, there often is no reason at all. Why do something instantly when the law lets you take a few days? I've been asked to stretch the timing out on purpose before.

There are many cases, however, where lists of email addresses are delivered in batches to third parties. In these cases, some campaigns may have already been prepared and scheduled by the vendor. Similarly, unsubscribe data is often delivered back to the customer in batches.

dylangs1030
Thanks for the inside look. This correlates with my findings - the smaller companies seem to reliably have instant, automated email subscriptions, while the larger ones see fit to take their take with the whole charade. But it's excusable (maybe) if it's due to your second point about pre-scheduling with vendors.
trin_
manual mail list management. and i'm not joking. i know of various companys that have some intern or apprentice doing their mailing list management by hand if they come around to do it.
dylangs1030
While I don't think that's the case I was asking about in question, that's horrible. I can't imagine assigning an intern to something as important, yet technically trivial as mailing list management. It could be very easily automated.