This is really annoying. What I find more annoying is response like "We will process your request within 30 business days." (and after that period receive another spam). What could possibly take 30 business days to unsubscribe email? This is evil.
I would also like to see some sort of standard - like email header with link, that would unsubscribe you. Outlook/thunderbird/etc could just show button (probably next to "mark as spam" :)) and you couldjust click and be done. I think google tried something like this, but I've never heard of anyone else.
> What could possibly take 30 business days to unsubscribe email? This is evil.
Companies can, and do, take out lists of subscribers and pass them to agencies to run campaigns for them, with potentially long lead times. Still stupid, but that's usually the reason.
Regarding standard, the List-Unsubscribe: header is sort-of that. It's not used much because there's little reason to - most clients don't do anything with them.
Gmail does use List-Unsubscribe: when you mark as spam a mail which has a valid List-Unsubscribe header, it will ask you if you want to unsubscribe instead, and will handle the unsubscribe request automatically.
The typical reason is that there's a whole host of systems that might be sending e-mail on behalf of the company, so there might be some delay (generally far less than 30 days) for it to flow through whatever integrations are set up, and hey - since there's going to be a delay anyway, why potentially shoot yourself in the foot by giving yourself less than what you're entitled to by law?
That's possible. But if DNS changes can propagate throughout the entire world in 24 hours, seems like removing my email from a bunch of Internet databases could too.
I'm assuming that the thought process businesses are going through goes something like:
- We have a complex series of integrations (marketing automation -> CRM system -> app -> transactional e-mail provider) (as one example) where propagation isn't real time and could take a few days (if say, each of these were propagated on a nightly batch).
- Something could go wrong with any of these.
- It's better to err on the side of caution and give a super-conservative estimate and always beat it by a huge margin, than give an accurate estimate and occasionally break it (particularly with something as sensitive as unsubscribes).
Sounds like a misinterpretation of CAN-SPAM which says:
"Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days."
which means the recipient gets 30 days (from receipt of each email) to opt out, the sender has 10 days to process the opt-out.
I would also like to see some sort of standard - like email header with link, that would unsubscribe you. Outlook/thunderbird/etc could just show button (probably next to "mark as spam" :)) and you couldjust click and be done. I think google tried something like this, but I've never heard of anyone else.