We live in a world of miraculous technology and yet it “may take up to 10 days” for me to unsubscribe from a mailing list. I have no clue what needs to happen to remove my email from a mailing list but it feels as if they’re using the Pony Express. If someone built a system that takes 10 days to deactivate an email address whoever built that system should not be writing any code. Modern systems are able to deal with billions of events a second and support millions of concurrent users but somehow updating a field in a database takes up to 10 days?

Of course it’s not just the code and there are business reasons for this but I can’t get over the fact that unsubscribing from a mailing list takes that long. I suspect the actual reasons are that they want to open up the tiny possibility that I may get an email over the next few days that get me resubscribe and that they may have a variety of systems that have my email address that would need to be purged. In any case it’s a bit ridiculous that it takes that long. Every time I unsubscribe and see a message that indicates it’s not immediate I cry inside.