Unsubscribe period



  • TRWTF is Yahoo! Mail. Now that that's out of the way, let's get to TRTRWTF.

    I started getting daily emails from Yahoo! containing news stories they think I'm interested in, to my Yahoo! Mail account. I consider this spam and am not interested at all, and I never asked for this. So I clicked the "unsubscribe" link on the email, got sent to a Yahoo! page where I confirmed that I wanted to unsubscribe. When I finished it told me it may take 10 business days or longer for it to take effect.

    Is someone manually reading unsubscribe requests, printing them, and snail-mailing them to some contractors in India to handle the actual unsubscription? Because that's the only reasonable non-evil scenario I can come up with.


  • Considered Harmful

    It's probable their email blasts are batched ahead of time so they're not using a live copy of the subscription list; probably not a full 2 weeks ahead of time but it's good for CYA purposes.



  •  Dunno. Have you tried asking them?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     I do believe I've desribed the [url="http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/26549.aspx#300684"]Mabel Management Protocol[/url] before.



  • It's just long enough for the user to forget they hit the "unsubscribe" button at all, and Yahoo! can keep sending the mails with impunity.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    It's just long enough for the user to forget they hit the "unsubscribe" button at all, and Yahoo! can keep sending the mails with impunity.
     

     More or less the probable answer.

    The other one is because they are actually paid per letter. So they take as long as they legally can to remove you, to send you some more newsletters.

     Some more dubious sites take unsuscribe as a proof the email is active, so they can now sell it to spammers (while still unsuscribing you to avoid legal problem)

    Personnaly, I put a rule to redirect that kind of email directly to trash. That way, the sender don't know whether the email account is active or not and they disappear instantly.



  • Here's a good time to point out that Gmail's spam filter is so amazing I forget what the "report spam" button looks like when I did get a spam earlier this week. (First one of 2013 btw.)



  • @TheLazyHase said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's just long enough for the user to forget they hit the "unsubscribe" button at all, and Yahoo! can keep sending the mails with impunity.
     

     More or less the probable answer.

    The other one is because they are actually paid per letter. So they take as long as they legally can to remove you, to send you some more newsletters.

     Some more dubious sites take unsuscribe as a proof the email is active, so they can now sell it to spammers (while still unsuscribing you to avoid legal problem)

    Personnaly, I put a rule to redirect that kind of email directly to trash. That way, the sender don't know whether the email account is active or not and they disappear instantly.

     

    Was it apple that was fined last year for not being able to remove an ad bashing a competitor from their website in a week's time? They argued that their organization is large and slow.The judge didn't buy it and considered a week's warning to be long enough for any company. Fun times. Now if I only could find a link to the news article...

     



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Here's a good time to point out that Gmail's spam filter is so amazing I forget what the "report spam" button looks like when I did get a spam earlier this week. (First one of 2013 btw.)

    I don't mind it removing spam, I mind it putting emails I want to receive in Spam.

    There's about a 50% chance that any given LinkedIn update (which I purposefully subscribed to and want to see) goes into Spam and not my inbox. I assume this is because other non-me idiots mark emails as "spam" even if they purposefully subscribed to them, and then Google runs *their* preferences on *my* mail.



  • @OldCrow said:

    @TheLazyHase said:

    ...

     

    Was it apple that was fined last year for not being able to remove an ad bashing a competitor from their website in a week's time? They argued that their organization is large and slow.The judge didn't buy it and considered a week's warning to be long enough for any company. Fun times. Now if I only could find a link to the news article...

     

     

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9648470/Apple-tells-judge-it-needs-two-weeks-to-update-website.html

    Close enough.

     



  • @mott555 said:

    TRWTF is Yahoo! Mail. Now that that's out of the way, let's get to TRTRWTF.

    I started getting daily emails from Yahoo! containing news stories they think I'm interested in, to my Yahoo! Mail account. I consider this spam and am not interested at all, and I never asked for this. So I clicked the "unsubscribe" link on the email, got sent to a Yahoo! page where I confirmed that I wanted to unsubscribe. When I finished it told me it may take 10 business days or longer for it to take effect.

    Is someone manually reading unsubscribe requests, printing them, and snail-mailing them to some contractors in India to handle the actual unsubscription? Because that's the only reasonable non-evil scenario I can come up with.

    I've been working in telemarketing customer service and while there could be a number of reasons based on my experience this smells like batch delivery. Marketing approves a P/O for 1 million emails and those will get sent within an agreed upon window, no matter what. Then opt-outs are compiled, Marketing pretends to do an analysis, a new P/O is issued, and so on.



    In some organizations promotional material is delivered by an internal team but more often than not it's outsourced. And you usually can't tell because external providers are looped in for legitimate email delivery (SPF and all that), often they are even connected with a VPN link to feed on the CRM or mainframe. But even if it's an internal team once the trigger has been pulled on a P/O it's too much of a hassle to double-check opt-outs or even cancelled accounts.



    True story: one time a new guy mistakenly ran the same batch three times in a row (about 50,000 emails per batch). The crazy thing is that some people opted out twice and then actually followed the link and bought the product in the third identical email received in a 2 weeks period. The account manager was thrilled and very shortly this backwash process was requested by other account managers who had poor results. The compliance guy went nuts over this of course, but nobody cared about him and he had bad hair anyways.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's about a 50% chance that any given LinkedIn update (which I purposefully subscribed to and want to see) goes into Spam and not my inbox.
     

    That's because about 50% of the emails that LinkedIn sends out ARE spam. I'm not on LinkedIn, but I still get a large amount of emails from them asking me to sign up, to confirm details, to view other people's profiles, etc, etc.

    I mark them as SPAM because that's what they are: unsolicited marketing emails from an entity with whom I have no business relationship. (Well, I used to mark them as Spam. Now they all get delivered right to the SPAM folder where they belong).

    If they're sending out enough of those that GMail weighs them as Spam then they only have themselves to blame.  You can always set up a rule to handle this. Settings -> Filters -> From *@linkedin.com -> Never mark as Spam.  It might even help balance out their Spam co-efficient.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @MiffTheFox said:
    Here's a good time to point out that Gmail's spam filter is so amazing I forget what the "report spam" button looks like when I did get a spam earlier this week. (First one of 2013 btw.)

    I don't mind it removing spam, I mind it putting emails I want to receive in Spam.

    There's about a 50% chance that any given LinkedIn update (which I purposefully subscribed to and want to see) goes into Spam and not my inbox. I assume this is because other non-me idiots mark emails as "spam" even if they purposefully subscribed to them, and then Google runs *their* preferences on *my* mail.

    I disabled all possible email options in LinkedIn but the address I use with this service (a dedicated alias) has been getting a lot of spam in the last few months, all fake emails from LinkedIn. I'm not to blame in your situation because I use Outlook.com but I can see why people would report junk in Gmail. There is a rising tide of shit coming from LinkedIn, they probably have some security hole somewhere that let people grab email addresses.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    That's because about 50% of the emails that LinkedIn sends out ARE spam. I'm not on LinkedIn, but I still get a large amount of emails from them asking me to sign up, to confirm details, to view other people's profiles, etc, etc.

    I mark them as SPAM because that's what they are: unsolicited marketing emails from an entity with whom I have no business relationship. (Well, I used to mark them as Spam. Now they all get delivered right to the SPAM folder where they belong).

    That's fine, but here is the problem: I am not you.

    @Lorne Kates said:

    If they're sending out enough of those that GMail weighs them as Spam then they only have themselves to blame.

    No; I'm blaming Gmail's retarded implementation of a Bayesian filter "shared" with completely random people, who are idiots and think the "spam" button is the same thing as the "delete" button.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    @The Awesome And Always Correct Lorne Kates who bets you don't even read this part said:
    I mark them as SPAM because that's what they are: unsolicited marketing emails from an entity with whom I have no business relationship. (Well, I used to mark them as Spam. Now they all get delivered right to the SPAM folder where they belong).

    That's fine, but here is the problem: I am not you.

     

    So you'd rather receieve spam from GetFucked.Example.Com, even though 1,000,000 other people have marked it as Spam because it is Spam?  What if you were a leigitmate customer of GetFucked, Inc-- a known and committed spammer? Well, you'll have to deal with the consequences of their bad behavior. Sorry.

    @blakeyrat said:

    No; I'm blaming Gmail's retarded implementation of a Bayesian filter "shared" with completely random people, who are idiots and think the "spam" button is the same thing as the "delete" button.

    I'll throw you a citation needed on that one. I agree that some companies get burned by their emails being detected as Spam when they shouldn't be, due to user input. But I refuse to believe that any amount of user input could false-flag someone as large and with as much email volume as LinkedIn UNLESS they were legitimately sending out that much Spam. Google has the ability to balance or ignore that Spam coefficient-- as evidence by the fact that they keep delivering me FIND OUT ABOUT GOOGLE ANAYLTICS emails even though I mark them as Spam. Do you really think someone from LinkedIn hasn't picked up the phone and said "Hey Google, whose dick does Bob the Blowjob Intern have to suck for you to stop marking our legitimate emails as Spam".

    Unless the majority of their emails actually are Spam. I wonder what Googling "LinkedIn Spam" will reveal. If only there was a way to actually do that search and read the relevant search results. Maybe 2014 will bring us that technological improvement.

    tldr: Blakeyrat is a me-first whiny baby who would rather everyone get spammed than him have to click a couple extra buttons one time.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Or the fun variation on this: Viacom. Every month or two I get a spammy mail from some TV channel owned by Viacom. Every time, I click the unsubscribe link which takes me to a page where I can unsub from that channel's spam and all the other Viacom ones. Or so it claims. Every time, I get a "this may take 10 days" and then in a month or two I'll get a spam from a DIFFERENT Viacom channel. "Oh, you didn't want Nick email? how about Bravo? No? MTV? We can do this a long time."



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    So you'd rather receieve spam from GetFucked.Example.Com, even though 1,000,000 other people have marked it as Spam because it is Spam?  What if you were a leigitmate customer of GetFucked, Inc-- a known and committed spammer? Well, you'll have to deal with the consequences of their bad behavior. Sorry.

    If someone creates an account on LinkedIn and says "send me updates", and then they later mark those updates as Spam, their "Spam" votes shouldn't count. Because they opted-in.

    I get the problem: the problem is that Gmail doesn't *know* whether a user opted-in or not, but that's just more reason to make it so user Foo's opinion of what is spam shouldn't affect *my* opinion of what is spam. Because Foo is a moron.

    LinkedIn isn't doing anything wrong here; people asked for email updates, they're sending email updates.

    @Lorne Kates said:

    I agree that some companies get burned by their emails being detected as Spam when they shouldn't be, due to user input. But I refuse to believe that any amount of user input could false-flag someone as large and with as much email volume as LinkedIn UNLESS they were legitimately sending out that much Spam.

    The more email volume, the more idiots are hitting the "spam" button on emails they explicitly asked for. So I don't think volume is a component here.

    @Lorne Kates said:

    tldr: Blakeyrat is a me-first whiny baby who would rather everyone get spammed than him have to click a couple extra buttons one time.

    "One time"? I have to unspam those emails every fucking week. It's a pain in the ass. And yes I could create a "rule" but fuck Gmail, why should I have to jump through hoops because their fucking spam filter doesn't work?



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    tldr: Blakeyrat is a me-first whiny baby who would rather everyone get spammed than him have to click a couple extra buttons one time.

    Well sign me up on the me-first team. Charity begins at home (and ends there as far as I'm concerned).



    Here is a story about phony altruism:



    Lorne Kates and Blakeyrat are celebrating tonight and end up in a brothel. There is a special that week: two hookers for $20. So they take the special but then when the hookers come out there is a sexy one and a digusting one. So Lorne Kates tells to Blakeyrat to pick one, and he picks the pretty one. Lorne Kates is then angry and tells Blakeyrat that he would never have picked the pretty one if he had chosen first. So Blakeyrat replies: well you get to fuck the ugly one anyways, why are you mad.




    tldr; you're a big phony



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    tldr: Blakeyrat is a me-first whiny baby who would rather everyone get spammed than him have to click a couple extra buttons one time.

    I disagree. I think Blakeyrate is a whinty baby who would rather everyone get spammed (or lite on fire, or kidnapped, raped and eaten by dingos) than him not have anything to whine about.



  • I think Blakeyrat is a pretty cool guy



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    ...the "report spam" button looks...

    Remember when they were text buttons and it was super-easy to know what they did? Then Google decided we needed confusing, ambiguous icons instead of text and... fuck 'em all.



  • @lettucemode said:

    I think Blakeyrat is a pretty cool guy

    Yay!



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Remember when they were text buttons and it was super-easy to know what they did? Then Google decided we needed confusing, ambiguous icons instead of text and... fuck 'em all.

    a.k.a. The World's Dumbest Solution to the problem of internationalization.

    No text means no translators! Who cares if it also means "no comprehension of what anything does."



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Google has the ability to balance or ignore that Spam coefficient-- as evidence by the fact that they keep delivering me FIND OUT ABOUT GOOGLE ANAYLTICS emails even though I mark them as Spam.

    Google probably doesn't run emails from themselves through a spam filter. That would be kind of dumb.

    And, sure, they could adjust the levels, but why? Google probably sees LI as a competitor to G+.

    @Lorne Kates said:

    "Hey Google, whose dick does Bob the Blowjob Intern have to suck for you to stop marking our legitimate emails as Spam".

    Yes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I get the problem: the problem is that Gmail doesn't know whether a user opted-in or not, but that's just more reason to make it so user Foo's opinion of what is spam shouldn't affect my opinion of what is spam. Because Foo is a moron.

    When I worked for a spam-filtering company, we ran three levels of corpuses: a central one, which contained things we put there and which we knew were spam; a shared one which used input from all users; and an individual one. The central and individual ones were weighted heavily, while the shared one was weighted low. Anyway, it kind of worked for us.

    As for LI: about half my emails from them end up in spam. I don't care; the only reason I have a LI is because people kept saying "Give me your LinkedIn" and I was like "Buh?" and they looked at me like I had polio and so I eventually just gave into it. I haven't logged into my LI in years and, truly, most of the messages from them are spam. However, I've never hit the "Report Spam" button on an email from a company that offers a legit unsubscribe because I know how badly it can fuck people over.

    For example, at that spam-filtering company, we had non-stop trouble getting blacklisted by Yahoo!. It was hilarious because Yahoo! Mail was like the source of 40% of the spam we had to deal with, but they were also the most aggressive freemail at blocking incoming mail. We contacted their tech team and would have them whitelist us, but it was such a clusterfuck over there it would take a week to get through to anyone who could do anything, and then within a month the whitelist just vanished. And nothing we were sending was spam (we ran all outgoing mail through the same spam filters we ran incoming mail through) but Yahoo! Mail was so fucking inept they couldn't actually use normal spam filtering, so they just blacklisted any IP which sent them more than a few thousand emails an hour. Problematic for us since we sent millions of emails a day to Yahoo!

    I eventually asked my friend who worked at Yahoo! to try to put me in touch with someone in the Mail department so I could get the whole thing settled. A week later he gets back to me that it looks like nobody is in charge or knows what is going on over there. So, yeah, total fuckery.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    LinkedIn isn't doing anything wrong here; people asked for email updates, they're sending email updates.

    Disagree. I get LinkedIn spam and I don't have, nor have I ever had a LinkedIn account.



  • @mott555 said:

    ...I don't have, nor have I ever had a LinkedIn account.

    Do you have polio or something?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    So you'd rather receieve spam from GetFucked.Example.Com, even though 1,000,000 other people have marked it as Spam because it is Spam?  What if you were a leigitmate customer of GetFucked, Inc-- a known and committed spammer? Well, you'll have to deal with the consequences of their bad behavior. Sorry.

    If someone creates an account on LinkedIn and says "send me updates", and then they later mark those updates as Spam, their "Spam" votes shouldn't count. Because they opted-in.

    I get the problem: the problem is that Gmail doesn't *know* whether a user opted-in or not, but that's just more reason to make it so user Foo's opinion of what is spam shouldn't affect *my* opinion of what is spam. Because Foo is a moron.

    I've had similar experiences. There are several columnists I follow, and I get emails from certain sites when a new column is up. All was well for a while, and then it occurred to me that I hadn't gotten one for quite some time. Sure enough, they were piling up in my spam folder. It took a couple of weeks to trail gmail to not put them there. I suspect the problem is that your basic intolerant progressive ignoramus started some sort of spam bombing campaign.

    It's annoying, but OTOH, I'm sure that massive group action saves us all a lot when we all don't have to train our personal spam filters about some new spam technique. Anger at the dumbasses who misuse the filters is appropriate.



  • Having worked for an email deliverability company (we helped legit emailers avoid the spam folder). I can tell you that

    1. An email list of any decent size (only takes a few thousand) will take days to send or you risk getting black listed by just about everyone who handles email.

    2) Legit mailers will often have a real mail campaign (what you actually requested) and several others (usually pure spam). Trying to differentiate the two is nearly impossible.

    3) A lot of companies have idiots working for them who wouldn't know a well formed email blast if it hit them in the head.

    The saddest part is that there is a lot of spam that is better written than a lot of legit newsletters.



  • @Sarcarsm said:

    I can tell you that

    1. An email list of any decent size (only takes a few thousand) will take days to send or you risk getting black listed by just about everyone who handles email.

    We weren't sending lists. I thought that was obvious when I said we were a spam-filtering company. In fact, we expressly forbid out customers from doing mass-mailings through our service; we told them if they wanted to spam people they'd need to go through Constant Contact or the like. We had a customer in France that repeatedly insisted on trying to send blasts through our service (which would get eventually get stopped by our spam filters.) We finally kicked them off rather than deal with them.

    No, the only service we had trouble with was Yahoo!. We had SPF and everything set up correctly and, as I said, we did spam filtering on outgoing mail to prevent hijacked accounts from ruining our reputation. Everyone else we could send to just fine, but apparently the only way Yahoo! could think to reduce spam was to block anyone trying to send them a large number of emails, legit or not.



  • I was referring to the OP, not you specifically.



  • @Sarcarsm said:

    I was referring to the OP, not you specifically.

    Oh. Well, you replied to me.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Remember when they were text buttons and it was super-easy to know what they did? Then Google decided we needed confusing, ambiguous icons instead of text and... fuck 'em all.

    a.k.a. The World's Dumbest Solution to the problem of internationalization.

    No text means no translators! Who cares if it also means "no comprehension of what anything does."

     

    Unlike that time you left me with the ugly hooker, I actually agree with you.

    It was also about the only time in the entire history of anything that I can remember Google actually adding this as an option. Settings -> General -> SCROLL WAY THE FUCK DOWN -> Button Labels () Icons or () Text

    Of course they balanced out that one usability concession by fucking things up further by hiding buttons that weren't in use. Where's the delete button? OH YAY IT ISN'T THERE! I guess they took that away so I'll have to open an email to delete them. Wait, no? I just have to check an email and then I get to see the delete button? Oh, well, that's consistent with no other email software ever. Thanks for saving me 18x36 px of screen space that are already statically reserved since the button bar never changes height or position. I wonder what else Gmail can do if I randomly start clicking on things to make magic buttons appear.

    Fuck's sake-- you already have the buttons there. You already have the logic there as to when they should or shouldn't be shown. Change the goddamn logic to Enable/Disable instead of Show/Hide, slap a fucking tooltip on the button that says "HEY ASSHOLE! Select a goddamn email before clicking delete, just like every webmail program's had you do for the past twenty cocksucking years!", and be done with it. And for good measure, throw an alert(InsultingErrorMessage) into the onclick, just so we don't exclude touchscreen devices.

    Fucking idiots.  Maybe they can take five minutes out of their busy schedule of fucking up arrow key navigation to address just one of their UI bugs.

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Settings -> General -> SCROLL WAY THE FUCK DOWN -> Button Labels () Icons or () Text
     

    I love you so much right now.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Fucking idiots.  Maybe they can take five minutes out of their busy schedule of fucking up arrow key navigation to address just one of their UI bugs.

    Sorry, all resources for fixing bugs have been re-allocated to developing 17 mediocre new languages nobody will use.



  • @billhead said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Settings -> General -> SCROLL WAY THE FUCK DOWN -> Button Labels () Icons or () Text
     

    I love you so much right now.

    Seconded. I don't care if he is a pillaging scoundrel, he just made my life perfect again.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @lettucemode said:
    I think Blakeyrat is a pretty cool guy

    YGay!

    FTFY



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    I do believe I've desribed the Mabel Management Protocol before.
    You've mispelled 'disrobed'.

    @MiffTheFox said:

    Here's a good time to point out that Gmail's spam filter is so amazing I forget what the "report spam" button looks like when I did get a spam earlier this week. (First one of 2013 btw.)
    The spam I get nowadays is messages trying to sell me into Google+.

    Oh, and I also get LinkedIn updates, but they land safely in the inbox; despite the fact that I've never subscribed and I'm not particularly interested in them. I guess I'm special.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    "One time"? I have to unspam those emails every fucking week. It's a pain in the ass. And yes I could create a "rule" but fuck Gmail, why should I have to jump through hoops because their fucking spam filter doesn't work?

    Indeed, why jump through hoops when you can jump through hoops every week? You're a fucking genius.

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I eventually asked my friend who worked at Yahoo! to try to put me in touch with someone in the Mail department so I could get the whole thing settled. A week later he gets back to me that it looks like nobody is in charge or knows what is going on over there. So, yeah, total fuckery.
    TRWTF is anybody believing that morbs has a friend.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Zecc said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    I do believe I've desribed the Mabel Management Protocol before.
    You've mispelled 'disrobed'.

    Fucking Mabel can't type for shit when I dictate to her.

    Also, Lorne likes wee-wees and is a mean person.



  • @da Doctah said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I eventually asked my friend who worked at Yahoo! to try to put me in touch with someone in the Mail department so I could get the whole thing settled. A week later he gets back to me that it looks like nobody is in charge or knows what is going on over there. So, yeah, total fuckery.
    TRWTF is anybody believing that morbs has a friend.

    Had. My story was past-tense.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Settings -> General -> SCROLL WAY THE FUCK DOWN -> Button Labels () Icons or () Text

    brohoof


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