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

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

3 pointsdylangs10308 comments

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?

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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.

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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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