Comment by Larrikin
1 day ago
I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe.
One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum.
If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.
My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
> but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe
This is a really bad business practice, people will just mark your mail as spam and the likelyhood of other people seeing your mails will drop
I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.
But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.
Because a lot of the time, it isn't.
If they were smarter they'd have normal jobs.
Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
> One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal.
Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?
> If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.
Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.
When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.
Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.
It’s because transactional email and marketing email are two different systems.
That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains.
I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.
As the end user: not my problem, I don’t care, I don’t need the implementation details.
I only care about what I see.
Sounds like an engineering problem that can be solved, and, more importantly, not my fucking problem.
I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one.
Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.
Don't do that, it will be disastrous for you.
Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe. Clearly mention that if they don't, this is the last mail they'll get from you, and keep that promise by deleting their address. You'll still get some pushback, but I think most people would find that acceptable.
At least with your suggestions there's some chance that their newsletter won't instantly get flagged as spam.
I'd do what you suggest, but send the newsletter from an separate domain once subscriptions have been confirmed.
2 replies →
> over the last decade
Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.
The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.
People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.
Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. If you plan to send a newsletter out.
Other than those voluntarily entered emails (which aren’t even linked to the user), we haven’t retained literally any information about our users, despite having millions of users download and use the app over a decade. Which is far beyond pretty much any social app I know. But almost no one actually cares.
My reaction would be to report spam with a vengeance
So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.
No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.
Complete assumption on your part.
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