“We can sign you up for spam in milliseconds without you even asking but it’ll take 7-10 days to unsubscribe you”
Switching rhe Cronjob from “0 0 */7 * " to " * * * *” would be too much to ask. Dark pattern goes brrr.
In fact, there is a whole site dedicated to unravel this shit: https://www.deceptive.design/
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 also work in marketing. Im thinking about the people who instead of hitting “unsubscribe” or “manage preferences” will reply to the email saying “unsubscribe me” or use the contact us form to send us a message.
or use the customer support feedback option in the product to send a similar message
which, maybe we just don’t pay for services that deal with that, but for us have to be manually entered
Aren’t replies to these addresses stored in /dev/null anyway?
Depends how big your company is. Our product team wouldn’t have the time to manage stuff like that, not to mention internal product isn’t directly connected to the marketing tools without a reporting step
The few I get are typically sent from an address like “dontreplytothisyounincompoop@company.com”
I don’t even bother unsubscribing anymore, I just mark it as spam and it stops appearing in my inbox
As you should.
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.
You’re doing the God’s work. Specifically, the part with purging the heretics. Thank you
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
Yes, I even ran every character through unicode search to make sure that none of them are different characters than what I thought. All of them were ASCII.
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”
Is that X formally known as Twitter, or X as a placeholder?
In this case both fits :-)
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.
It could be a day or so. Some companies have lots of different DB that sync back and forth and may only run merge jobs once a day. But three weeks? Get the fuck out of here!
Because the laws requiring them to unsubscribe you give them up to a certain amount of time to actually do so. And corporations employ stalker logic and figure “if I can just talk to her she’ll understand that I’m not actually a bad guy!” Instead of just respecting your decision from the get-go.
And then they leak/sell your email so for each cancelation you receive 7 different new spam mails on a daily basis.
At least that’s what it seems like most of the time.
I think it depends on the sender… Traderjoe.com is probably just going to delist you. Indigochildren@fun.zlx probably is just going to sell your email address to everyone.
instant block sender if they do
Delete Alias, done
Using SimpleLogin, I create an alias for every new sign up and just turn it off if not needed. Only give your personal email to people not apps and websites.
In my experience giving my actual email to people will have the email end up with some app anyway because most people don’t understand basic email privacy and will just sign you up for whatever purpose they asked for your email without asking you first. So people also get my SimpleLogin alias.
Ever start receiving email from sites you’re certain you set to “no contact?” Drives me crazy.
