

Ask HN: Why Does It Take "10 Days" To Be Unsubscribed From Marketing Emails? - dylangs1030

I went through another round of unsubscribing myself from annoying marketing emails today. When I did so, the site in question&#x27;s confirmation page said to allow 10 days for the effect to take place. Does anyone know why this is?
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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.

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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.

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socillion
The CAN-SPAM act requires unsubscribe requests to be honored within 10 days.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-
SPAM_Act_of_2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003)

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dylangs1030
Thanks for the citation. It's a shame; this implies a lot of companies do this
just because they're allowed to procrastinate by law.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

