I’ve been trying to reduce the burden on my email inbox by unsubscribing from as many email lists and newsletters as possible – most of them I signed up for a long time ago and have no relevance any more.
Besides, my Netnewswire newsreader is much more efficient way of keeping on top of things.
What has intrigued me has been the variance in the time it takes to get oneself off some these lists – most are instant – but some (from organisations that should know better), say it may take up to 14 days to be removed.
How does that work?
2 replies on “Why does it take 14 days to unsubscribe from an e-mail list?”
I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from an Orange mailing list for over two months now.
First off, it told me it would take up to 28 days. Which is crazy isn’t it – I don’t can’t believe the process isn’t all automated.
I am still receiving emails even after the 28 days is up – but it’s now impossible for me to unsubscribe as Orange tell me it has no record of my email account on its systems.
The fact it doesn’t have my email address hasn’t stopped it sending me emails every couple of weeks though.
Bang goes all my customer trust in the Orange brand.
if you have a Crazy Stalker trying to mess with your email, you might be grateful that they could spoof an email from you to get you off the mailing list. Checking unsubscriptions by hand probably doesn’t provide much security because who’s going to actually read them. It does mean they can run the cleanup as a scheduled job once a week/fortnight/month rather than having an interactive process which might have security issues. A proper user management system where you control your sub in realtime is best, but requires grown up programming and grown up business processes.