Ask HN: Why does an email unsubscribe take "10 business days?" | Hacker News Reader

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

7 pointsjstalin10 comments

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 10 business days 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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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...

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.

There are some countries where it's illegal to have people's personal information without their consent - and that includes specially email adresses.

If you {live,make business} In that country, you should send your unsubscribed emails to your mailing list providers so they stop sending them to you.

I would like to point out that often a company has multiple email vendors and may be in the process of migrating. This means that there are multiple systems that need yo be updated. And they may be using multiple email lists internally. Generally the 10 day is really only a few days, but they are giving themselves leeway in case a weekly sync fails

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.

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.

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

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.

I'd flag it as spam in the meantime.

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

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