Thursday, August 1, 2019

Why Unsubscribing Can Take Time

Joe Pettersson:

I saw a tweet asking why sometimes when you unsubscribe from an email list it says it can ‘take a few days’. Buckle up, as I have a RIDICULOUS story about this happening in The Enterprise™️...

[…]

This web service sends an email to an internal email address every time it’s clicked. This happens 100s of times a day.

This email was originally sent to an individual. They left the bank five years before.

This mail address is now forwarded to an email group. They couldn’t change the address as it’s hard coded and they don’t have the code that was used to compile this Java 6 service.

[…]

If they’re a customer, they execute another SQL query that updates a customer record in a type of ETL staging area. Every one of these changes is reviewed (at 4pm UK time) by a team in an office in Scotland. If they approve it, it gets executed 24 hours LATER at 4pm

[…]

If they ARE a ‘high value prospect’ the marketing team MANUALLY sends an email asking if they REALLY REALLY want to unsubscribe? It looks like an automated email, but it ain’t.

[…]

IIRC this took FOUR BUSINESS DAYS on average.

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