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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> marketing team in Swindon

Presumably this refers to Nationwide Building Society, then.

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)

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

"Prejudice against offshore workers and a light sparkling of racism"

How many H1Bs and outsourced workers can attest to this fact ?

Takes time to sell your email

I'm not surprised that, the comments so far have not discussed about the casual racism part that the twitter thread has mentioned.

Were it to be of some negative consequence, the whole of HN would be discussing how bad the Indians were

Just a month back if I remember correctly, there were a slew of articles on the web that accused Indian software ecosystem as one of the main reason for the issues in Boeing 737, even when it has been denied by Boeing.

I cannot understand how people that preach eloquent sermons on racism and equality justify their casual racism towards India and it's people