
Why does unsubscribing from a newsletter take “a few days”? - scop
https://twitter.com/Joe8Bit/status/1156312965265707013
======
JakeStone
I work for a company in a department that sends out on average, 2 million
emails a day. These are emails to people who (1 or more):

\- have signed up and are receiving a verification email.

\- are giving us money

\- are using our site at least once a week during the first month, and even if
they taper off, are at least using it every 180 days.

So, we're not sending email to people who we've never met, as it were. We have
an unsubscribe link in all our emails, and an account email settings page that
has about half the mailings we can send as initially subscribed (we like
money), but which can be turned off. We even have links to our settings page
in the emails and on all the site pages.

I like to think we're being fairly responsible, all in all.

Like I said, we send 2 million emails a day. That goes out on a lot of
machines, and we have lots of automation going on nearly every minute, and
lots of email queues being prepopulated to send out in volumes acceptable to
gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc.

So, you've asked to unsubscribe to the email you received last week. We got
you, fam. I analyzed logs and did some live testing using our VPN at offices
across the world. Over the past 3 years, you've been removed from your chosen
lists within 2 seconds of clicking the button. This obviously doesn't cover
hardware/network/server problems.

So we're cool, right? Nope. You're unsubscribed all right. However, we already
placed you in the queue for our most recent mailing about 4 hours ago, and
you're going to get the last one from us anywhere within 2 seconds from now to
maybe late tomorrow.

You really won't get anymore from us after that, though.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
It doesn't seem that complicated to remove a single entry from the e-mail
distribution list of millions that's going out in one to two days. Harder
problems have been solved. This doesn't adequately explain it.

The reality: it's financially a waste of time for a company to create an A+
off-boarding experience. Getting 1-2 extra emails isn't the end of the world:
it's good enough for the company, you get off the list, they don't have to
think about that unprofitable problem any further.

Most companies don't put much effort into off-boarding. Some go out of their
way to make it even less palatable. But for removing yourself for a mailing
list, I don't consider this to be the worse. Things surrounding payments are
much more important: if I cancel service, you better not continue charging me.

Most people don't consider the full lifecycle of anything, and I wish they
did. We've created a society, for example, that consumes disposable plastics,
as an ordinary daily activity, and that ends up in our waterways as
microplastics. It's easy to make things. It's an order of magnitude more
difficult to manage the full lifecycle of the thing.

~~~
pilsetnieks
The technology behind it all could actually function perfectly but in reality
an overworked marketing intern grabs a csv file from their desktop, opens it
in Excel, compares and manually removes the unsubscribes (from another csv
file that's delivered to them daily by email because that's easier) because
"that's how it's always been done around here", then saves it as "June email
push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1)(1).xls" on their desktop, deletes all their
subscriber lists in Mailchimp, as per the usual procedure, and imports "June
email push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1).xls" from their desktop, and sends out
whatever.

~~~
Fr0styMatt88
So much this. These kinds of workflows are far more common than you would
think they’d be, looking in from the outside.

This is true even if your company has in-house developers. At the small
company I work for, we have barely enough developer bandwidth to cover most
things related to our core products as it is. Improving internal support
processes just isn’t even on the radar for us as a dev team. So those things
either get contracted out (where we as a dev team may have limited or no
evaluation input with regards to the quality of the solution), purchased
(again with little or no input from us as devs) or are built ad-hoc by the
less technical side of the business.

Companies have a lot of internal moving parts and resource limitations that
together lead to these kinds of things.

------
lwf
Let's imagine you use 3 different marketing providers, plus an in-house one,
because you're a big company and your teams all want to use whichever tool
works best for them.

A user unsubscribes. This creates an entry in one specific system. In order
for that to be reflected across all systems, it needs to be copied somewhere
central, then synced back out.

Ideally you'd have a webhook hit a Lambda function and call it a day.

But, again, largish company with a gotta-move-fast employee growth mindset,
engineering doesn't want to work on it (or, if not a tech company, you don't
have in-house engineering).

So you hire some consultants who convince you that your email marketing is a
"big data" problem, and they contract out the work on some Enterprise
Infrastructure Platform as a Service product (an expensive, slow Lambda). The
resulting system is slow, and often breaks, and you run it every few days in
one bulk load/unload.

Poor engineering is why it takes a few days.

~~~
dheera
If they don't want to make it easy to unsubscribe me immediately I just report
it as spam. Hopefully that goes into Gmail's whatever "big data" of spammers
and starts getting them classified as spam across the entire network.

~~~
ryandrake
Why not simply always report as spam? I have a zero strike policy with
spammers. I’m not going to even try your “unsubscribe” link. You’re going to
get marked as spam if you’re spamming me, and I’ll have the satisfaction of
knowing you’re 0.000001% more along the way towards not being able to have
your emails received.

~~~
marcosdumay
If I subscribed, I'll try to unsubscribe. That's just fair.

If the newsletter appeared from nowhere, then yes, it's spam.

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, and it’s insulting to even call it “unsubscribe” since I did not
subscribe in the first place! The word itself subtly tries to shift blame onto
the victim, as if it’s their fault they are getting spammed.

~~~
dvtrn
Like those Robocalls that leave you a voicemail featuring someone clearly
reading from a script, intimating that they're "returning your call" about
something you know for a fact you never called about?

Go away Janice, I don't need an extended vehicle warranty, and no I didn't
contact you for information.

------
rkho
One of the problems with unsubscribing is that I've seen a LOT of marketers
re-using old lists and importing me back into a new list from some obscure
snapshot, often with names like "new-list-feb-2019". There's no guarantee
that, even when I unsubscribe from a given list, the company hasn't already
exported my email address to some CSV file for future marketing efforts.

~~~
Macha
Or the linkedin approach of "oh, you opted out of featured posts and featured
comments on featured posts but we've just invented a new category of "your
three hop connections commented on a featured post" and you're included

------
chris_st
This is an awesome story.

Oh, and in case you're wondering how they did (similar) things in the Good Old
Days(TM), let me tell you a story from the late 70's/early 80's.

I subscribed to "Cycle" magazine in my youth, and due to mistakes on their
part, for a couple of years I got two copies, and when I finally decided to
unsubscribe, I got only one copy a month (but for another year).

My mother had written to them to unsubscribe me (it was a recurring birthday
present).

My first year of college I wound up meeting a guy in the magazine subscription
business, and told him my story, and told me how it worked.

Turns out that they got a LOT of mail at the (US) publisher. So they had a
machine with a gripper that grabbed each letter, held it while a grinder
ground off (!) three edges of the letter, and then put it on a conveyer belt.
One person was tasked with folding the top page of the envelope back so the
letter was revealed, and a few people (IIRC) took them and put them in boxes,
taping the letter back together (!) when part had been ground off with the
edge of the envelope.

These boxes of letters were then sent to Ireland (!) to be processed, where
people entered what should be done on some kind of mainframe application,
which then cut 9-track tapes that were sent back to the US for processing.

Told this to my Mom, with the delightful result of seeing her collapse in
tears of laughter.

------
ryanworl
The actual reason is that CAN-SPAM dictates that an opt-out must be honored
within 10 days. [1]

[1] [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
center/guidance/can...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business)

~~~
stronglikedan
CAN-SPAM is US only and doesn't allow for a "REALLY REALLY want to
unsubscribe?" confirmation email.

------
verbatim
I've always assumed that the answer is that due to the way email works, mail
can, in certain (rare) situations, end up stuck in a queue somewhere between
mail servers and not delivered until a couple days later.

Saying that unsubscribing takes a few days means that in the off-chance that
this happens, the sender has some coverage against annoyed users who have one
of these mails delivered after unsubscribing.

But this is just my guess.

~~~
lbatx
I'm sure that's some of it, but it's also a result of lists being pulled ahead
of time. Imagine you have 100,000 subs and 10,000 of them are going to get
promotion A and then another 15,000 (with some overlap) promotion B. Often,
the lists are pulled before the content is ready. Sometimes getting the final
approval on marketing emails takes a bit, and so the person who unsubbed when
they got email A are already on the list for email B.

~~~
lancesells
As someone who works in email I've never used a platform that's not using
real-time lists or segments. A business could certainly do it this way but it
would be a lot more work and a lot less effective.

~~~
lbatx
I'm not saying it's best practice. I'm just describing some things I've seen.

------
ufmace
Nice story of enterprise life. But personally, I still apply strict standards
- if your unsubscribe link doesn't unsubscribe immediately, then you are spam,
and will be marked and treated as such.

~~~
WaylonKenning
Pretty tough when it's your bank. I get marketing phone calls from Bell all
the time trying to sell me on more TV channels. Joke's on them - I don't even
own a TV! I tell them every time they call, they say thank you, and I get a
call from them again every four weeks or so.

~~~
president
For most big banks/institutions, important account emails are usually sent
from a different domain than marketing campaigns. YMMV though.

~~~
NikkiA
I don't think I've ever had a single marketing email from my bank (cahoot),
tbh.

------
heyyyouu
It's because of permissions there's different databases, plus most importantly
the drop lists are usually keyed up 48 hours in advance (you have to do in
advance because of all the checks you have to do, etc.). They can take you out
of the main but you're probably in some drop lists that have already been send
to the provider -- that's why they say a few days/72 hours.

------
davchana
At least in India some companies sell/leak their user email list to others;
those others also cultivate these details from domain names, company
registration etc; & then fake or referred-link emails on genuine companies'
name (with or without Genuine Company's consent).

I got bombarded with 35+ emails every day few years back; & documented it at
[https://gitlab.com/davchana/gmail-indian-spam-
domains/blob/m...](https://gitlab.com/davchana/gmail-indian-spam-
domains/blob/master/readme.md)

Unsubscribe link click marks your email as live/hot; & gets them a higher
price everytime it is clicked by you & then sold by them as fresh hot.

~~~
lolc
I don't click on "unsubscribe". My standard procedure is to look up the
sending IP-Address in WHOIS and send a note to the operator's abuse address.
The good ones take reports about unsolicited mails seriously, and the bad ones
end up on blacklists.

Based on the responses I (rarely) get, I've helped boot a few spammers from
their servers by providing evidence to the operator.

------
snoldak924
At my company, we prepare one-off marketing and legal email blasts in advance,
and need the final recipient list a couple days before sending. This allows
time for processing the list for opt-outs, duplicates, etc.

~~~
ericd
That sounds like O(minutes) processing time with a reasonably written
program/indexed db and a few million subs? And I’m sure you could get it to be
faster than that. Based on all these comments, it frankly sounds like the real
answer is that no one gives enough of a shit to do this right.

------
mooreds
I would say because

* This gives cover in case it takes a bit of time. Better to promise a few days and do it sooner than vice versa.

* Letting people go is, in general, bad for business so hasn't been optimized.

* Multiple systems are involved, increasing complexity.

------
ufo
I think this is the first time that I have preferred to read something as a
long twitter thread instead of as a single blog post.

Seeing the explanation go on and on and on without a clear indication of how
close we are to the end enhanced the kafkaeske atmosphere.

------
parsimo2010
So often I assume a process is totally automated, but a lot of the time I
should be more empathetic, because there is a person in the loop and they are
usually just trying to keep the system they inherited from blowing up. They
have no time to fix it.

This illustrates something that I think a lot of us in the "computer industry"
often misunderstand. We see a mass email system (or anything happening at
scale) and assume the whole thing is automated, because that's how we would do
it.

Too often a system is cobbled together, only barely works, and is only semi-
automated. Even something that is 99% automated but generates thousands of
actions per day ends up creating a high workload for a human.

I've even seen where my email address was clearly hand-typed from a form (not
even copy/paste), because I usually sign up for website accounts using Gmail's
plus feature. I created an account at Website A with the address
"myemail+websitea@gmail.com" and then received an email a day layer sent to
"myemail+wesbitea@gmail.com" which Gmail still delivered because they ignore
everything after the plus sign. The only way that error happens is if someone
typed it by hand. [Plus emails are a great way to find out which companies
sell your info to spammers. Most of the time nobody bothers to run a regex to
fix "plus" addresses into the original address, so the evidence of data
selling ends up right in the email header.] I feel sorry for the person that
is eventually going to have RSI because they hand-type the entire list from
their web form into their email software.

------
crtasm
What's with the large number of 'unroll' requests to some bot in that thread?
Can't they just click the first response from it?

------
theshadowknows
In our case we often have people write or call our global support number and
request they be unsubscribed. They don’t have that ability be they create a
ticket. That ticket gets sent along and eventually winds up in an admin’s
inbox. That’s why it takes a few days.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> marketing team in Swindon

Presumably this refers to Nationwide Building Society, then.

------
ignu
This was a decade or so ago, but we used to get a list of ~2 million email
addresses that we'd import into a new database and a single mailing would take
anywhere from 2 to 3 days to complete. Sometimes it would take us a few days
to get to it though.

The one to two weeks lead time always made a lot of sense to me.

(And yeah, you don't need to tell me how horrible everything about that
process is... but it worked and no one's motivated to fix it. I wouldn't be
surprised if that's the same process they're using today)

------
pier25
Creating a Mailchimp (or similar) account and using that for your newsletters
doesn't take much effort and would be so much more efficient than the mess
described.

Why are big and medium companies usually such a mess?

Is it because the bigger the company the less people care?

Maybe it's that the complexity and discipline required is simply too much for
the average human?

Maybe companies do not have or are unwilling to invest the needed resources?
(which ironically creates more waste)

~~~
heyyyouu
Giving over your list to a third-party provider like Mailchimp can be a risk.
One thing most publishers is more protective over than anything else is the
database. Also, Mailchimp just isn't ideal for high volume mailings/companies
who do this as a revenue generator. It's designed more for the mom-and-pop
operations.

~~~
pier25
Ok, Mailchimp was a bad example (we actually use Sendgrid for our newsletters)
but my point was about using a service that solves this for you instead of
having such a convoluted process.

------
hanoz
The reason it takes a few days is because the next mailshot you're going to be
getting in the next couple of days will be sent out by some third party to
list of email addresses which was exported to a csv file and sent unencrypted
to their gmail account yesterday.

------
klauslovgreen
I came across this if you are using Gmail, pretty efficient:
[https://ctrlq.org/code/19959-gmail-
unsubscribe](https://ctrlq.org/code/19959-gmail-unsubscribe)

------
davesmith1983
I suspect the bank they are talking about is most likely Nationwide.

They are based in Swindon. I am quite surprised their in house tech is this
bad because their online bank account is one of the better ones.

------
ptmcc
I used to work at an email service provider that managed email marketing
campaigns for some pretty large companies. It's been quite a number of years
now, but I don't imagine things have changed all that much.

Mostly, it's just CYA language because of the way the various old and slow
systems work, plus the CAN-SPAM act legally allows up to 10 days to process an
unsub.

There are multiple checkpoints that prune lists as they get churned through
the machine, so typically you'll be fully unsubbed within 24 hours (often much
less), but they don't catch all cases at all times.

The abbreviated process for sending out a marketing campaign at a large ESP
typically looks like:

\- Marketing manager makes a request for a list of people that match x/y/z
analytics criteria (e.g., purchased within last x months, typically opens
email, geographic region, etc). Depending on how "sophisticated" the criteria
are and how backed up the analyst department is, this may take a couple of
days to get turned around.

\- The list of addresses is created and then pruned down by known unsubscribes
or other do-not-email constraints in the system at the time the query runs.

\- The resulting list gets sent out for review and approval by the marketing
manager and client (how many people are we going to mail, what is it going to
cost, what sort of metrics do we expect, etc). Since this is a human-in-the-
loop process, it may again take up to several days to turnaround.

\- After approval, the list gets churned through the unsubscribe list again,
dropping any new unsubs. This step _should_ catch new unsubs within that "it
may take up to few days" window mentioned in the title.

\- The final list is then queued up for sending, which depending on the size
and meter rate may go out over the course of several hours. If you've already
been queued up your unsubscribe request is typically going to get missed for
this run.

Now, add on the complexity of syncing up multiple databases between the ESP
and the customer, which is typically a nightly batch job at best. So even
though your unsubscribe hit some web server instantly, it may take a couple of
days for it to fully filter through from the web server to the client's
marketing databases into the ESP's database. It's similar to why banking and
ACH is so terrible: it's just ancient design patterns and slow process and
nobody wants to pay money to modernize it. And if they miss a few unsubs they
are still well within the legal bounds so it's whatever.

tl;dr: A lot of email marketing still runs on chains of batch jobs which can
introduce windows of unsynchronized lists getting sent out.

~~~
heyyyouu
It 100 percent is still this way. But generally your queued list can be set up
1-2 days beforehand, so that's why it's often 48-72 hours, because you're
already in that list that's been cleaned at the provider for drop.

------
magoon
The next campaigns’ subscriber lists are compiled in advance whilst being
drafted.

------
pier25
Off topic, but god I hate the new Twitter for desktop.

~~~
tobib
Why they use twitter for what I think would fit way better in a short concise
blog post is beyond me.

~~~
drdrey
You get a lot more eyeballs posting directly on Twitter than posting an
external link. Sharing, liking, commenting are all one tap away.

~~~
pier25
Yes, but it's hard to follow branching conversations in Twitter unlike Reddit
or HN.

