I unsubscribed from Apple’s email because although I have an iTunes account I don’t want to get all their spam. When I clicked on the unsubscribe link and made the request, the confirmation page said, “Your email address and/or subscription preferences have been updated. Please allow up to 10 days for any changes to take effect.”
It’s 2012. What the heck takes 10 days to take an address off an email list? Do they have to ship a tape to Thailand? Or is it punch cards going to China?
I see that with a lot of subscriptions, and my assumption typically is that they sell their email list a few times each month, and they want the extra time in order to leave yours on there for another cycle. But that may be too cynical.
Additional junk mail might be held up in a mail server queue somewhere, only to eventually get delivered later. You can imagine how angry people get when they think their unsubscribe was ignored, when in fact it wasn’t.
Software developer here. Oftentimes, systems are interlinked so that they share data in a batch format at specified times rather than immediately. For example, the web site may be a separate system from the email list software. The website could be set to keep a list of all email list changes requested and send them as a single, batch request at a specified interval, such as every midnight. Asking you to wait over a week is a bit overkill, though. It could be that the change has to be propagated to a central server and then broadcast out and each jump has to wait for a batch, but ten days seems to be way overkill for such as system. I do know that, in days of old when bandits bold roamed the seven seas, stuff could take days to propagate from server to server because each server connected by modem every night to exchange data with neighbors, but those days when that was the best you could do is long sped.
This is correct from a technology perspective (I work in the digital ad agency world).
Why “10 days” is often the length of time given is because that’s what’s required by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
In my experience, many removals are virtually instantaneous, with the vast majority (98%+) happening within 24-48 hours, depending on the exact set up of the system.
You might occasionally get a small shop sending an email that still processes unsubscribes by hand, but given any large quantity of emails and the availability of cheap, easy-to-use bulk mailing software, its usually a very small shop or maybe a small/local non-profit program or something like that.
Software development manager here. Been there, done that. Never seen one that took 10 days (as you recognize).
Aha.
It’s a standard caveat we give out at my company (which sends a lot of marketing e-mails) because some mailings (even electronic ones) are prepared several days in advance of sending them out, including the list of addresses it is going to. If someone unsubscribes during that time, they may still get one more mailing, but no more after that.