

Ask HN: Why does an email unsubscribe take "10 business days?" - jstalin

I unsubscribed from the email list of the Wall Street Journal today by clicking on the "unsubscribe" link in an email. The page comes up and says that I've unsubscribed, but that it may take up to <i>10 business days</i> for it to take effect. Why on earth does it take so long? I've had other sites say something similar in the past. Anyone have any insight?
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myleshenderson
Companies like that often work with third party vendors to do the actual
distribution of emails. So when you unsubscribe, that notification likely has
to be passed through various internal systems and then on to the vendors
handling distribution who can remove you from their lists. These are
frequently batch process that only run periodically...

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byoung2
I used to work for ClearChannel, and this was the case with many of their
properties such as Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, etc. An unsubscribe would be
recorded in a local database immediately, but the email provider would sync
their database with ours every Friday at midnight. So an unsubscribe on
Saturday morning would take at most 5 business days. The user was quoted 7-10
business days just to be safe.

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csixty4
I worked for a company whose custom email campaign system took about a week to
send out a campaign. This was a decade ago, so processing power has improved,
but I'm sure the mailing lists have grown as well.

First, it took days to go through millions of data warehoused customer records
and match them to cohorts, and then A/B variants within each cohort. Then,
someone needed to spot-check the output to make sure it was good before the
rack of mail sending servers could spend the next couple days sending them
out. On a good day, I think each server managed to get out 10 emails a minute.

Our IT department was adamant that there be an air gap between these public-
facing "spam servers" and the data warehouse (our bread & butter), so a last-
minute query to check for unsubscribes was out of the question. If you were
assigned to a cohort on Monday and unsubscribed on Tuesday, you were still
going to get that email Friday.

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kgermino
I think part of this is CYA. CAN-SPAM (US) gives them 10 business days to stop
the emails, so they allow themselves the full time. I've never gotten an email
more than an hour or too after unsubscribing from legitimate emails.

Edit: Although byoung2 points out a case where you would get the emails for a
few more days at least.

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induscreep
More importantly, why is an email subscribe only 0.01 business days while
unsubscribe is 10 days?

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rzen
The initial subscribe can take as many as 10 days, too. The initial
confirmation (opt-in verification) is immediate because that's part of the
server where you subscribed, but the distribution (as already explained)
happens elsewhere and requires a sync of the updated list (subscribes and
unsubscribes) to the distribution service.

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thoughtcriminal
I'd flag it as spam in the meantime.

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byoung2
That's a little mean-spirited...I assume he meant to subscribe initially, so
it isn't spam.

