Frequently when I unsubscribe from unwanted emails, the unsubscription service will say something like “please allow 10 days for this change to take effect”. Why that long? Data travels pretty quickly, last I checked.
Because some mass-mailings are queued up and prepared several days before they are to be sent.
There are a couple of possible valid reasons and a the requisite “hey we’ll get you with at least 10 days more spam” reason.
But for the valid ones - Most help desk or call centre staff don’t have permissions to directly change the database, so they’ll add your name to a list which will be collected together with all the other lists that the agents have created and in what is likely a weekly change window some poor schmuck will sit down and delete all the appropriate records.
The slightly more automated version of this is the phone agent is given rights to flag your file for deletion and those flagged files are reviewed, batched and deleted in bulk.
Basically they’re giving themselves time for process.
I was referring more to automated services, like where you click the “unsubscribe” link in the email, rather than a phone agent or help desk. I just unsubscribed from Apple’s product emails and it gave me the 10 day thing.
That automated process may not be. It’s likely that it gets handled manually.
Or it once was handled manually, or batched up, and there’s no real incentive to change the notification message now that it’s not. Do you actually continue to receive email for 10 days?
Another possibility: the company has outsourced their bulk email sending, and the company that sends the emails will only promise a certain turnaround time on changes because they don’t want to deal with their database getting thrashed if a whole bunch of their customers all try to change their email lists at once.
To add to the above, padding is often used in timelines like this. If you’re honest and say “It usually takes around 24 hours”, the one guy who did it on Christmas Eve at 11:50pm and ignored red glowing maintenance warning text that says that a nuclear strike has hit the facility and processes may be slightly delayed will still inevitably call and bitch because he got an email 24 hours and 1 minute later. So, you take the longest possible time you can foresee (given outages, maintenance, etc.), add a few days, and there you go.
Example: we say that we’ll process refunds “within two business days” and that from there it’s up to your bank to post it to your account. In practice, we issue them when we get the info, and they post that midnight, but the bank takes awhile. Just this week, I got some brain trust who was told this at around 4pm on Friday, and an email was waiting for us when we opened Monday that it wasn’t on her statement yet. After all, to her, Friday and Monday are two days, and she ignored the other part completely. This is why most companies say something ridiculous like it takes 20 business days or whatever, just to avoid the cost of morons who don’t understand things.
These explanations strike me as a bit ironic considering the speed at which one can be added to these lists. If that process is automated and happens damn near instantly… why can’t the reverse be true?
My cynical self who seems to keep getting stuff from lists I’ve un-subscribed from says, to make you forget that you’ve un-subscribed so they can keep sending you stuff.
You might get the confirmation email immediately, but it’s doubtful that it’s true that you’re automatically on the list as soon as you register. Massive email campaigns do take time. We’re a small shop, but sending a newsletter update (a few tens of thousands) was an operation that took a few hours. We’d also be barraged for quite some time with bouncebacks, then unsubscribes, etc. Unsubscribes were, in that case, a manual process, even though signup up wasn’t. Neither were really instantaneous in any true sense. Even if unsubscribes were automatic, it wouldn’t have been instant – remember, our little mail server is getting barraged with thousands of bounces and unsubscribes (more the former than the latter) on top of all of its normal load.
Now, we didn’t send stuff that much, so we didn’t need to queue up all of this data ahead of time. We sent messages maybe every few months, not every day. For big operations, I don’t doubt that they queue up lists from their database ahead of time, even days ahead of time, for their planned email deployments. It’s not like you can pull up millions of email addresses instantaneously from a database, stick an email on it, and poof it’s gone. A big email list takes significant resources to contact.
Maybe there are exceptions, and there are guys with cigars cackling about continuing to market to people who don’t want it. I generally doubt that this is the strategy, though. I think it’s more a matter of logistics plus, as I explained, a bit of padding time.
Under such tight deadlines so much development focus is setting up the system to receive and send out emails that the removing piece is given less of a priority (working in development and seeing the tight deadlines and lack of proper qa has me not want to know how banking software is written, ick)
At my last company to keep the data consistent weekly snapshots of data was captured and fed into all the systems that use it. So if a record wasn’t in before the cut it would need to wait a week.