Companies usually use external services for these kind of things, and these emails are usually queued well in advance. It’s easier for them to remove you from any future mailing than go around removing emails from the queue.
You can kind of divide data processing systems into two groups: batch processing (systems that run on a schedule, every x hours or whatever), and real-time processing (every request is handled immediately on being received).
A real-time system for managing subscriptions should be able to handle your request to unsubscribe in a second or two at most, but a batch processing system might easily only run once every night. If anything fails tonight, your request will only be processed tomorrow. That’s your 24–48 hours right there.
You’d think that this stuff is easy, but tools for building real-time data processing only really became available in the last ten or so years, so older services were built before those tools became mainstream. Many mailing list systems are from the dotcom era, and might well still be running on old tech. I saw a job ad the other day for Perl programmers, and Perl hasn’t been popular since the 90s!
Also, real-time is usually more complex than batch, at least if you’re not used to it, so companies that don’t need to do real time processing often choose not to. It’s a reasonable argument that there’s not enough money to be made in mailing list software to justify the effort.
The benign reason is that they might have different services that communicate and they only do batch updates every few hours or once a day (and they might pad their estimate up to 48 hours). Like the email unsubscribe request might not filter through to their customer management tool right away.
Of course, fixing some data feed to run more often so that unsubcribes kick in a few hours faster, is not going to get someone promoted to the corner office. So if some system gets set up a little bit janky to begin with, there’s not much incentive to improve it later on.
I honestly got tired of unsubscribing, they wouldjust restart with a new name, the same content. I think robinhood sold me out. I just mark as spam now and it seems to be working.
Yeah, it can take 24–48 hours, but it’s not always about the actual tech needing that much time. It’s more about how their email system is set up. Some companies batch their email sends ahead of time, so if you unsubscribe, your info might not be removed from the next batch that’s already queued. That said, some definitely use it as an excuse to sneak in one or two more emails before you’re off the list
They aren’t lying. They are covering their ass for two key reasons:
Often this data is exported from the database for a mailing. If you run an export, and then remove an address from the database, then that address is still in the export and that address will get an email.
While email is usually nearly instant, the system was designed for durability and the potential that a server might be down. If you send an email on Monday, and the destination mail server is offline until Wednesday, then the email gets delivered on Wednesday, which can be confusing if someone was removed from a mailing list on Tuesday.
Sometimes your email gets put in a list to process, and it gets processed once a day or something like that. The time might vary, or they might include a buffer in case there’s an error.
been a full stack developer for about a decade now. depends.
you absolutely could develop a system where once you click “unsubscribe”, you’re immediately unsubscribed.
you could also poorly (or purposely) create a system that only updates itself every 24 / 48 / 160 hours. or worse, outsource it with the directive of “don’t lose subscribers”
can it take that long? yes it could. does it need to, no.
Running batch jobs are pretty common for computer systems that handle large amounts of data. Instead of having a bunch of programs running at the same time listening for data to come in live and processing it in real time, they batch of the data in a single (or multiple) file and at scheduled intervals fire up a single application to load all the data at once. This helps keep resources free and prevents programs unexpectedly hogging resources when another application needs it.
In your case, the company collects the accounts that need to be deleted throughout the day and at a specific point in time, they fire up the batch job to process them all at once.
When I used to work for call centers there was the National Do Not Call List that everyone had to follow but we got around that because I was with AT&T and the national DNC list only applies to cold calling. Since these people were landline customers it was perfectly legal for us to call them and sell them cable TV as they had an existing relationship with us.
I had to explain that to many people. That being said we did have an internal do not call list that we respected.
But the thing is we would get huuuge lists of like 20,000 numbers and each list was a ‘campaign’ and we would have multiple campaigns. For example your number could be on the u200, u300, or u400 campaigns and when you asked to get put on the DNC list it would only pull you from the current campaign. IT would then have to remove you from the database and then go and manually remove you from all the campaigns.
You’d think this would be an easy process but ATT employs tons of call centers all around the world and they all have different campaigns and different IT departments. Its a gong show. We would tell people it could take up to 30 days which was actually true.
Now you’re probably asking how this applies to email well the answer is we also had Do Not Mail, Do Not Email, and the trifecta Do Not Contact lists and the same logic applies.
In terms of if they actually do this, yes, because they’ll collect all the unsubscribes and execute them at the same time in a batch job.
Whether they’re lying about unsubscribing altogether, quite possibly. There’s definitely lists I try to unsubscribe from multiple weeks in a row before I just ban the email address
Comments
They probably only do purges every couple days and do a bunch of deleting all at the same time
Companies usually use external services for these kind of things, and these emails are usually queued well in advance. It’s easier for them to remove you from any future mailing than go around removing emails from the queue.
There’s probably batch jobs to gather up and remove the unsubscribers that are run on a schedule.
Depends a lot on how their system is set up.
You can kind of divide data processing systems into two groups: batch processing (systems that run on a schedule, every x hours or whatever), and real-time processing (every request is handled immediately on being received).
A real-time system for managing subscriptions should be able to handle your request to unsubscribe in a second or two at most, but a batch processing system might easily only run once every night. If anything fails tonight, your request will only be processed tomorrow. That’s your 24–48 hours right there.
You’d think that this stuff is easy, but tools for building real-time data processing only really became available in the last ten or so years, so older services were built before those tools became mainstream. Many mailing list systems are from the dotcom era, and might well still be running on old tech. I saw a job ad the other day for Perl programmers, and Perl hasn’t been popular since the 90s!
Also, real-time is usually more complex than batch, at least if you’re not used to it, so companies that don’t need to do real time processing often choose not to. It’s a reasonable argument that there’s not enough money to be made in mailing list software to justify the effort.
The benign reason is that they might have different services that communicate and they only do batch updates every few hours or once a day (and they might pad their estimate up to 48 hours). Like the email unsubscribe request might not filter through to their customer management tool right away.
Of course, fixing some data feed to run more often so that unsubcribes kick in a few hours faster, is not going to get someone promoted to the corner office. So if some system gets set up a little bit janky to begin with, there’s not much incentive to improve it later on.
I honestly got tired of unsubscribing, they wouldjust restart with a new name, the same content. I think robinhood sold me out. I just mark as spam now and it seems to be working.
Their servers have to update
Yeah, it can take 24–48 hours, but it’s not always about the actual tech needing that much time. It’s more about how their email system is set up. Some companies batch their email sends ahead of time, so if you unsubscribe, your info might not be removed from the next batch that’s already queued. That said, some definitely use it as an excuse to sneak in one or two more emails before you’re off the list
They aren’t lying. They are covering their ass for two key reasons:
Often this data is exported from the database for a mailing. If you run an export, and then remove an address from the database, then that address is still in the export and that address will get an email.
While email is usually nearly instant, the system was designed for durability and the potential that a server might be down. If you send an email on Monday, and the destination mail server is offline until Wednesday, then the email gets delivered on Wednesday, which can be confusing if someone was removed from a mailing list on Tuesday.
Sometimes it’s immediate.
Sometimes your email gets put in a list to process, and it gets processed once a day or something like that. The time might vary, or they might include a buffer in case there’s an error.
Sometimes it’s even longer than that. Sometimes it’s never. But usually, yeah. It’s that fast.
It’s not like they want to keep sending you mail when you unsub, you’re obviously not interested in buying whatever they’re gonna send you
Just got out of a company/billing for saying “while your product is lovely, I just don’t have a need for it anymore” killed them with kindness I guess
been a full stack developer for about a decade now. depends.
you absolutely could develop a system where once you click “unsubscribe”, you’re immediately unsubscribed.
you could also poorly (or purposely) create a system that only updates itself every 24 / 48 / 160 hours. or worse, outsource it with the directive of “don’t lose subscribers”
can it take that long? yes it could. does it need to, no.
Running batch jobs are pretty common for computer systems that handle large amounts of data. Instead of having a bunch of programs running at the same time listening for data to come in live and processing it in real time, they batch of the data in a single (or multiple) file and at scheduled intervals fire up a single application to load all the data at once. This helps keep resources free and prevents programs unexpectedly hogging resources when another application needs it.
In your case, the company collects the accounts that need to be deleted throughout the day and at a specific point in time, they fire up the batch job to process them all at once.
No its definitely true.
When I used to work for call centers there was the National Do Not Call List that everyone had to follow but we got around that because I was with AT&T and the national DNC list only applies to cold calling. Since these people were landline customers it was perfectly legal for us to call them and sell them cable TV as they had an existing relationship with us.
I had to explain that to many people. That being said we did have an internal do not call list that we respected.
But the thing is we would get huuuge lists of like 20,000 numbers and each list was a ‘campaign’ and we would have multiple campaigns. For example your number could be on the u200, u300, or u400 campaigns and when you asked to get put on the DNC list it would only pull you from the current campaign. IT would then have to remove you from the database and then go and manually remove you from all the campaigns.
You’d think this would be an easy process but ATT employs tons of call centers all around the world and they all have different campaigns and different IT departments. Its a gong show. We would tell people it could take up to 30 days which was actually true.
Now you’re probably asking how this applies to email well the answer is we also had Do Not Mail, Do Not Email, and the trifecta Do Not Contact lists and the same logic applies.
In terms of if they actually do this, yes, because they’ll collect all the unsubscribes and execute them at the same time in a batch job.
Whether they’re lying about unsubscribing altogether, quite possibly. There’s definitely lists I try to unsubscribe from multiple weeks in a row before I just ban the email address