“We can sign you up for spam in milliseconds without you even asking but it’ll take 7-10 days to unsubscribe you”
the reality is more that it’s handled by an intern using a fully GUI service to click a check box to unsubscribe you but finds even that a technical challenge.
The true reality from someone who works in this space is that every company with an intelligent marketing department uses an email service specialized to help market to a customer file filled with email addresses with preferences tailored to each customer, and marketing campaigns are designed days or weeks in advance and scheduled to go out on a rolling basis. Email addresses that get queued up for some sort of email campaign are already “locked and loaded” to some degree and are not designed to be unraveled to remove one random unsubscribe request. Since the email providers receive client updates perhaps once a day to fill campaign lists, your unsubscribe as a rule will not immediately sync to be removed from any future campaigns you’re not already signed up to receive. On top of that, syncs can and do fail, however infrequently. This means that if there is a technical issue with the connection of some sort, it can take a day or two to resolve. A heavy marketer may still send a couple emails to a customer that unsubscribed while that sync issue is being repaired.
tl;dr: Most companies remove you from email campaigns within a day. 7-10 days is CYA language in case something goes wrong.
I don’t even bother unsubscribing anymore, I just mark it as spam and it stops appearing in my inbox
I work in IT, and part of ITs duties is managing the enail filter and investigate emails detected or reported as phish or spam.
We don’t normally see the actual email, but we get basically all the metadata, you can see all sender information, super useful when dickheads try to spoof the sender, we see all URLs in the emails, with a wuick summary of if it is a bad URL, attachments as well, they all get scanned and we get warnings about them if shit is bad.
I take great pleasure in blocking senders and reporting spam/phishing to improve the global filters.
If a bad email campaign has gone through the filter we have the tools to find the emails in the differebt mailboxes and delete them, the system is also capable of doing this automatically if it detects bad stuff after delivery.
Meanwhile microsoft’s exchange online can’t even prevent attackers from spoofing microsoft.com as the sender. I nearly got caught by a fake quarantine notification once. The thing that made me suspicious was that the fake login page only took a second to load. The real one is never that fast.
The entire quarantine BS is trying to reinvent the wheel of the spam folder and causes a shitload of headaches for our internal IT.
Are you 100% certain that the sender domain was microsoft.com ? I have almost been had by something like rnicrosoft.com
Click here so we can track you, I mean unsubscribe you
The only acceptable email to receive in that case is “You have now unsubscribed from X”
IMO that’s unacceptable too. State that you’ve been unsubscribed on the confirmation page and never email again. You literally just told them never to email you again and they immediately emailed you. Also the ones that say “you’ll be removed from our mailing list in 2-3 weeks” should be fined. It doesn’t take 3 weeks to process an unsubscribe. Sure, it can take a day or two to propagate through all the databases if they use a convoluted database schema, and sync jobs, but WTF is up with 3 weeks? They’re just like “we’re going to go ahead and keep sending you shit for a few weeks. MK?”. Fuck you!
Definitely no to all that crap with weeks delay, unsubscribing should take seconds or at maximum until next DB sync, and that can’t be more than a few minutes.
