This is a bit of rant. I'm currently checking (triaging, really) my email, and I've decided to click all the unsubscribe links in the marketing emails. The thing is, I've already done this. Many times.
For many of these, I've just started reporting them as spam. I'm sorry, but if you ignore the fact that I've unsubscribed from your email, I'm calling you a spammer.
Of course, about half the time I'm invariably met with a Server Error. JRun Connector Protocol Error. Figures.
There are a few however, that I just don't want to report as spam. One of which is my bank! Don't ask me why my bank is sending me marketing email, because I really have no idea. They've already got my business, and I'm already using the thing they're trying to sell me. Excuse me while I go flip some tables.
OK, I'm back. So, I do try to unsubscribe from my banks marketing email, and I get this: We're sorry to see you go. Please allow 7-10 business days for us to process your request.
Really?
So, I can just imagine that their process for handling these requests goes like this:
- A user clicks the unsubscribe link, and this sends an email to customer service.
- A customer service representative receives an unsubscribe email notification containing my email address.
- The customer service representative then types my email address into an excel spreadsheet.
- Once some arbitrary quota has been met, the spreadsheet gets mailed to IT
- Someone in IT then manually writes an SQL statement, being careful to type in all the email addresses as they appear in the spreadsheet.
- They then copy and paste this SQL statement into an email, and send that to an Operations team.
- The Operations team, then copies the SQL statement, pastes it into an SQLPlus terminal (they are using Oracle, of course), and when it fails to execute correctly, they give up and send a nasty email back to IT.
- Steps 5-8 repeat an arbitrary number of times until someone just gives up.
This all happens again next month when I try to unsubscribe again.
Yay, Computers.