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Let's imagine you use 3 different marketing providers, plus an in-house one, because you're a big company and your teams all want to use whichever tool works be
by lwf 7y ago
Let's imagine you use 3 different marketing providers, plus an in-house one, because you're a big company and your teams all want to use whichever tool works best for them.
A user unsubscribes. This creates an entry in one specific system. In order for that to be reflected across all systems, it needs to be copied somewhere central, then synced back out.
Ideally you'd have a webhook hit a Lambda function and call it a day.
But, again, largish company with a gotta-move-fast employee growth mindset, engineering doesn't want to work on it (or, if not a tech company, you don't have in-house engineering).
So you hire some consultants who convince you that your email marketing is a "big data" problem, and they contract out the work on some Enterprise Infrastructure Platform as a Service product (an expensive, slow Lambda). The resulting system is slow, and often breaks, and you run it every few days in one bulk load/unload.
Poor engineering is why it takes a few days.
- dheera 7y agoIf they don't want to make it easy to unsubscribe me immediately I just report it as spam. Hopefully that goes into Gmail's whatever "big data" of spammers and starts getting them classified as spam across the entire network.
- ryandrake 7y agoWhy not simply always report as spam? I have a zero strike policy with spammers. I’m not going to even try your “unsubscribe” link. You’re going to get marked as spam if you’re spamming me, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re 0.000001% more along the way towards not being able to have your emails received.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIf I subscribed, I'll try to unsubscribe. That's just fair. If the newsletter appeared from nowhere, then yes, it's spam.
- ryandrake 7y agoYea, and it’s insulting to even call it “unsubscribe” since I did not subscribe in the first place! The word itself subtly tries to shift blame onto the victim, as if it’s their fault they are getting spammed.
- dvtrn 7y agoLike those Robocalls that leave you a voicemail featuring someone clearly reading from a script, intimating that they're "returning your call" about something you know for a fact you never called about? Go away Janice, I don't need an extended vehicle warranty, and no I didn't contact you for information.
- inetknght 7y agoNow that an adversary can know this about you, I suggest you learn how spearphishing campaigns work.
- Aeolun 7y agoYou enter your email on a website that already sent you an email? What would that achieve?
- inetknght 7y agoMoreover, clicking the link is all which is necessary for a successful spearphish.
- kalleboo 7y agoHow so? If there's a zero-day in the browser? Or is there that much value in just getting their IP address/user-agent?
- lonelappde 7y agoBrowsers often have zero days.
- stordoff 7y agoIf I signed up, I'll unsubscribe (that's on me -- I asked for it, it's not unsolicited). Otherwise, it's marked as spam.
- asark 7y agoIf I don't want it, and I certainly don't want any more, then it's spam. Doesn't matter if it's showing up because I forgot to unclick a checkbox somewhere and so isn't technically "unsolicited". Ain't no-one got time to help marketers lie to them. Try not sending me stuff I don't want.
- baddox 7y agoIt’s a bit extreme to say that any email that you don’t want is spam. I joined a mailing list years ago for an open source project I was interested in, and recently I stopped using it. I don’t think those emails suddenly became spam because my interest changed. Of course I unsubscribed through their system, I didn’t report it as spam.
- Khoth 7y agoI agree. And if I "forgot" to unclick a checkbox somewhere it's almost certainly because the website used some dark pattern to make it easy to get wrong.
- mooreds 7y agoIt does. Can't speak for Gmail specifically but we ran a biggish email operation a few years ago (sending real estate alerts) and were notified when some of the big providers users marked our emails as spam. So unless things have changed, the newsletter providers are notified.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago> Ideally you'd have a webhook hit a Lambda function and call it a day. Or use something like Kafka / SQS / Pulsar / Google pubsub and process it as many times as necessary.
- inetknght 7y ago> Let's imagine you use 3 different marketing providers, plus an in-house one, because you're a big company and your teams all want to use whichever tool works best for them. > A user unsubscribes. This creates an entry in one specific system. In order for that to be reflected across all systems, it needs to be copied somewhere central, then synced back out. The idea that it takes any longer to unsubscribe just demonstrates the marketing companies being user-hostile. Let me demonstrate why what you're saying sounds ridiculous: A user is subscribed to a marketing provider (probably against their knowledge or desire). Minutes later all three marketing providers have the user's information. If the system is slow, the marketing company would solve that pretty quick. If it often breaks, the marketing company would solve that pretty quick. If you run bulk loads/unloads every few days... maybe I could see that. Maybe. But the marketing company is likely going to want to fix that too. How many users do this database have? Thousands? Millions? Databases from twenty years ago handled that just fine and quite fast too. Are you trying to tell me that modern databases are slower? Or are there perhaps too many users in the database from, eg, a dragnet? Is the Enterprise Infrastructure Platform as a Service product truly to blame? Are you trying to tell me that the service is incapable of handling the ingress of a data point (user subscribed, user unsubscribed) in a timely manner? If that's truly the case then I have to truly wonder what else that service doesn't handle well: user privacy and information security are two top points that I'd wonder about. Competence and susceptibility to spearphishing would be some others. Oh, right. Marketing companies aren't "user-hostile". Users aren't their target audience; users aren't their "users". Businesses are.
- gibba999 7y agoCompany I worked at did have bulk loads/unloads every so often. This didn't need to be fixed for outgoing emails, or at least wasn't a priority. If you unsubscribed, you'd get taken on/off the generic newsletter-style mailings immediately. Things which were less common (e.g. surveys) could take a while. That wasn't an issue. If someone who joined today didn't receive something from the survey mailer, that was a-okay. For unsubscribes, people didn't complain. I suspect that was because (1) Our customers trusted us. (2) Most customers received no more emails. The number of people who got a second email from some auxiliary system was very small. But we couldn't guarantee immediate, full unsubscribes. Regarding competency, security, and privacy, those are rare resources in the tech industry. Most companies couldn't care less about security of user data or privacy. Most also can't achieve competence.