4 ms·

It doesn't seem that complicated to remove a single entry from the e-mail distribution list of millions that's going out in one to two days. Harder problems hav

It doesn't seem that complicated to remove a single entry from the e-mail distribution list of millions that's going out in one to two days. Harder problems have been solved. This doesn't adequately explain it. The reality: it's financially a waste of time for a company to create an A+ off-boarding experience. Getting 1-2 extra emails isn't the end of the world: it's good enough for the company, you get off the list, they don't have to think about that unprofitable problem any further. Most companies don't put much effort into off-boarding. Some go out of their way to make it even less palatable. But for removing yourself for a mailing list, I don't consider this to be the worse. Things surrounding payments are much more important: if I cancel service, you better not continue charging me. Most people don't consider the full lifecycle of anything, and I wish they did. We've created a society, for example, that consumes disposable plastics, as an ordinary daily activity, and that ends up in our waterways as microplastics. It's easy to make things. It's an order of magnitude more difficult to manage the full lifecycle of the thing.

pilsetnieks 7y ago
The technology behind it all could actually function perfectly but in reality an overworked marketing intern grabs a csv file from their desktop, opens it in Excel, compares and manually removes the unsubscribes (from another csv file that's delivered to them daily by email because that's easier) because "that's how it's always been done around here", then saves it as "June email push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1)(1).xls" on their desktop, deletes all their subscriber lists in Mailchimp, as per the usual procedure, and imports "June email push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1).xls" from their desktop, and sends out whatever.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The fact that the company is run so inefficiently seems to be a separate problem from the technical feasibility.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  So much this. These kinds of workflows are far more common than you would think they’d be, looking in from the outside. This is true even if your company has in-house developers. At the small company I work for, we have barely enough developer bandwidth to cover most things related to our core products as it is. Improving internal support processes just isn’t even on the radar for us as a dev team. So those things either get contracted out (where we as a dev team may have limited or no evaluation input with regards to the quality of the solution), purchased (again with little or no input from us as devs) or are built ad-hoc by the less technical side of the business. Companies have a lot of internal moving parts and resource limitations that together lead to these kinds of things.
jmchuster 7y ago
Ah, i wrote my message out to my Kafka queue? Oh, there's not an easy way to remove it? Great, let's rearchitect our system around a different system that makes it easy to remove items from a queue once we've sent it out. Oh, there is none? Great, let's hire a bunch of experts who can write such a system from scratch that competes with the mainstream queueing systems out there. Or we could just say queued messages are queued, and tell our customers they'll stop receiving emails roughly a day from now.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  If you (generally, not you specifically) architected a system that's brittle in the face of new requirements, that speaks to the resilience of the architecture to withstand change.
nemetroid 7y ago
> Getting 1-2 extra emails isn't the end of the world: it's good enough for the company, you get off the list, they don't have to think about that unprofitable problem any further. If I receive any further e-mails after unsubscribing, I mark them as spam. I don't think I'm the only one who does. That should be some incentive against sloppy unsubscribing mechanisms.
- D-Coder 7y ago
  You've unsubscribed. You're no longer a customer. Why should they care? (Other than if they want to be decent human beings.)
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    Because 1 in 3 email adresses is @gmail.com and google learns very fast from the Spam button. So if you want your emails to arrive to the subscribed people...

pilsetnieks 7y ago

The technology behind it all could actually function perfectly but in reality an overworked marketing intern grabs a csv file from their desktop, opens it in Excel, compares and manually removes the unsubscribes (from another csv file that's delivered to them daily by email because that's easier) because "that's how it's always been done around here", then saves it as "June email push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1)(1).xls" on their desktop, deletes all their subscriber lists in Mailchimp, as per the usual procedure, and imports "June email push (1)(1) copy 2 (1)(1)(1).xls" from their desktop, and sends out whatever.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The fact that the company is run so inefficiently seems to be a separate problem from the technical feasibility.
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
So much this. These kinds of workflows are far more common than you would think they’d be, looking in from the outside. This is true even if your company has in-house developers. At the small company I work for, we have barely enough developer bandwidth to cover most things related to our core products as it is. Improving internal support processes just isn’t even on the radar for us as a dev team. So those things either get contracted out (where we as a dev team may have limited or no evaluation input with regards to the quality of the solution), purchased (again with little or no input from us as devs) or are built ad-hoc by the less technical side of the business. Companies have a lot of internal moving parts and resource limitations that together lead to these kinds of things.

jmchuster 7y ago

Ah, i wrote my message out to my Kafka queue? Oh, there's not an easy way to remove it? Great, let's rearchitect our system around a different system that makes it easy to remove items from a queue once we've sent it out. Oh, there is none? Great, let's hire a bunch of experts who can write such a system from scratch that competes with the mainstream queueing systems out there. Or we could just say queued messages are queued, and tell our customers they'll stop receiving emails roughly a day from now.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
If you (generally, not you specifically) architected a system that's brittle in the face of new requirements, that speaks to the resilience of the architecture to withstand change.

nemetroid 7y ago

> Getting 1-2 extra emails isn't the end of the world: it's good enough for the company, you get off the list, they don't have to think about that unprofitable problem any further. If I receive any further e-mails after unsubscribing, I mark them as spam. I don't think I'm the only one who does. That should be some incentive against sloppy unsubscribing mechanisms.

D-Coder 7y ago
You've unsubscribed. You're no longer a customer. Why should they care? (Other than if they want to be decent human beings.)
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Because 1 in 3 email adresses is @gmail.com and google learns very fast from the Spam button. So if you want your emails to arrive to the subscribed people...