On the escapability of marketing emails
Originally from a Twitter thread.
One personal beef of mine (with the internet, of which there are many) is with email marketing. Itâs crazier for me to look back and realize that I used to work in digital marketing and ate up the marketing industry gospel of email engagement; yep, I once used popular tools like MailChimp and HubSpot to spam mailing lists with chirpy, ârelatableâ content that encouraged clicks. Those days are behind me, though certainly quite informative, and now Iâm just a grump on my digital lawn, kvetching about the exhaustive, endless slog of spam-like emails in my inbox.
One bone Iâve had to pick for a while is with Xfinity, my local internet provider (not that Iâve got many competitive options in my area). As far as my internet goes, itâs fine for my uses, and for the most part doesnât really impact my life outside of move-ins, new user registration, and move-outs. One exception to that: my inbox.
Xfinity at least tells you if an email is an ad; +1 to CAN-SAPM compliance, I guess.
Now, donât get me wrong; Iâll give Xfinity some credit for actually complying to CAN-SPAMâs rules in saying whether an email is âservice-relatedâ or an âadvertisement,â though Iâve definitely gotten promotional-content emails that have been marked as âservice related.â (Unfortunately I donât have receipts for those, as itâs understandably tiring to collect screenshots of every single horrible interface I encounter). That said, that information is always in the greyed-out, deprioritized fine print at the bottom of a mega-HTML email, so Iâd warrant that few people actually open up their annoying mail and scroll all the way down. I only do so for work, or when an email worms past my painstakingly developed inbox filters that STILL donât catch everything. Marketers are wily!
After a few random instances of inbox opening and aggravated sighing following the receipt of yet more Xfinity emails for products and services I do not want or need, I finally decided to spend the clicks on the unsubscribe button rather than letting the emails fester in Googleâs cloud storage (and subsequently, my inbox filters).
Stop getting promotional emails in 48 hours? Sign me up!
The site initially presented me with a bunch of individual toggles â ugh â but I clicked on those anyway and quickly left the site. A bit of time later, I noticed I was still getting emails, so I checked back â ugh x2 â and went back to the unsubscribe page only to see that Iâd hastily left the site the first time around; if I scrolled down, I was rewarded with a bulk toggle to opt out of EVERYTHING at once. And if I took a look at the greyed-out fine-print below that, I was rewarded with text that told me when I should expect the ceaseless influx of chirpy promotions to, well, cease. Great! I opted out, and was excited to stop seeing emails within 24-48 hours. And just to be sure, this second time around, I noted the date. February 28, 2022, I opted out of âall email communicationsâ on Xfinityâs provided unsubscribe link.
But the cards were not in my favor, and whatever happened in Xfinityâs email system piping kept sending emails. I kept an eye on my inbox for a few weeks, opening emails to check if they were ads (yep), but realizing that MAYBE my original individual toggles were triggering that 60-day âprocessing feeâ for opting out under their ânew marketing preference center.â However, according back at the fine print, which is in the above screenshot taken today, I did technically flip the switch on opting out of all email communications on 2/28. Regardless of my original toggles, in theory I should have stopped getting emails by 3/2 under my interpretation of the Xfinity fine print.
Look at how many âADVERTISEMENTâ emails I got past that 24-28 hours! The thread with 2 emails is my record of when I âunsubscribed-all.
Maybe there was an issue with my memory on when I had actually tried managing those individual toggles. My best estimate of when I first clicked those other toggles is around 2-4 weeks before 2/28, based on how often I actually open that inbox. Today, April 27, is 52 days after the day I hit âunsubscribe-all,â meaning Xfinity would have 8 more days of leeway to continue sending me advertising emails if Iâm being generous about their fine print and using the 2/28 date to measure their âindividual preferences effect turnaround.â But if we assume that I did toggle individual settings around 2/14, I should not be receiving that 4/21 email that triggered this all, because I definitely turned off each individual item.
For the benefit of Xfinityâs doubt and to account for my shaky memory of Unsubscribe Attempt #1, Iâll keep an eye on T-60 days after 2/28 to see if maybe some wires got crossed with my multiple selections. Weâll see if Iâm still getting any emails after 5/5, which would be 60 days after 2/28, which is not even the correct start date from which to count to 60.
On user expectations
My own rudimentary experiment and data collection aside, Xfinityâs fine print on expected âoffâ dates for email preference processing are either buggy at best, confusing at not-so-great, or straight-up dishonored at worst.
Specifically, the text reads:
As we transition to our new marketing preference center, changes may temporarily take additional time to go into effect. It may take up to 60 days to apply your individual marketing preference changes. If youâve unsubscribed to all marketing communications, this will be applied within 24-48 hours.
The second sentence gives an upper bound of 60 days for individual marketing changes, which in my case is wonky due to my failure to remember when I toggled those. If I did those on the same day as 2/28 (which I know I did not), or even the day before, then fine â in the absence of the third sentence, I should wait out around 7-8 more days and test my hypothesis again then. But if I un-checked those weeks earlier, say on 2/19, then 60 days would lead me to 2/20 and I shouldnât have received an advertising email on 4/21.
When the third sentence is accounted for, then everything goes to sh**. Firstly, it is likely unclear to users who do make it to the fine print whether the bulk opt-out toggle would override prior individual preferences. What happens if users (like me) performed both individual and bulk actions? Is, as Iâm thinking, the set of individual preferences with their longer processing time considered the default if users do both? When would an option override another? Would bulk opt-out only be applied if the user NEVER touched an individual toggle? (See next section on transparency through design).
Regardless, I did perform a bulk action (thus meeting the requirements in the third sentence) and subequently expected the opt-out to be applied within 24-48 hours. This didnât happen. Whatâs the point of providing users with options if those options arenât effectively honored, communicated, or explicitly caveated? Is XFinity compliant with CAN-SPAM purely because they provide all these frontendy goodies (the advertisement disclosure, this fine print, and an unsubscribe portal)? (Hint: Technically, it isnât. Yet it persists!)
On transparency through design
Messy and confusing disclosures aside, users canât even see the bulk toggle option unless they scroll allllll the way down the page past other options. The bulk options are not provided at the top, clearly or conspiciously, and the details on when their preferences will be honored falls below all toggles at the ultimate bottom of the page.
This is what I get on a reasonably-sized, relatively new MacBook screen when first opening an unsubscribe link.
This is what I get if I scroll all the way down.
Maybe Iâm just salty and sensitive, but sure â even if the bulk toggles were at the bottom and we want to serve fine-tuned items first, why are the disclosures not provided next to those toggles? Particularly those that say it takes 60 days for individual preferences to be honored â why is that information divorced from the rest? Perhaps the end user doesnât find this information useful or thinks itâs truly fine-print content; all extra stuff that they donât have time for. And thatâs more than fair; users want value fast and donât have as much time as me, someone researching this stuff, to read every single piece of tiny-font gray text.
However, Iâve learned to expect bulk actions to be available at the top of interfaces; in spreadsheets, does anyone ever do anything to a column by using controls at⌠the bottom of a column? No. When you want to do anything en masse in other table-oriented or nested designs, is the bulk option at the bottom?? Most likely not! Think of menus and expand all/collapse all options; those are usually prominently or at least logically displayed near the top of the design for whatever needs to be managed in bulk.
In my opinion, there are a number of things wrong here.
- The âallâ options are divorced from the actual items they manage and are presented as a distinctly separate option
- The bulk toggles arenât visible anywhere on the first screen that will show for most users
- The bulk toggles require scrolling
- The disclosures on processing time for individual toggles are not near the individual toggles (And, of course, while my screenshots show everything as opted-out, they were opted-in by default when I first opened the link).
These designs obfuscate the truth of what the userâs options are and donât present options equivalently in value, nor transparently (with all the hiding). Users are forced to take on the labor of scrolling, clicking, reading, toggling, and waiting in order to avoid an interaction that is defaulted in the best interests of Xfinity. Xfinity deploys this at scale; itâs trivial for them to send emails to anyone who goes through the effort of registering with them. Users cannot operate at-scale. You tell me who loses out with shady practices like this.
On CAN-SPAM Compliance
Earlier I asked whether having all the frontend discosures and buttons indicated CAN-SPAM compliance, and no, they do not for Xfinityâs case (as far as I can tell with a cursory search through applicable regs). Itâs bad enough that compliance is a losing battle with a lot of labor costs attached and itâs easy to pass an audit at one point in time and fall back on non-compliance until the next period of scrutiny!
The FTCâs CAN-SPAM Compliance Guide for Businesses states that orgs should:
Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipientâs opt-out request within 10 business days. You canât charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they donât want to receive more messages from you, you canât sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company youâve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
Correct me if Iâm wrong, but last I checked, 60 != 10. Sounds great, right? Clearly the emails Iâve been getting, or even the disclosures Xfinity provides, should get dinged as non-compliant, right? The official opt-out prohibitions for all emails are for charging fees or requiring information for opting out, in Section 316.5 â subrules then link to 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4) which mandate that 10-day rule. With a quick read, Iâm not entirely sure when that 10 days kicks in, but it sounds to me that it kicks in within 10 days of receipt of the opt-out request, which Xfinity is now at least 42 days behind on for my case.
Well, great â if theyâre non-compliant, now what? Personally, I donât know where to go to do anything about this and while this wasnât a waste of my time (this is great fodder for future research), this is certainly frickinâ annoying and (hopefully, if I read things correctly) illegal.
The FAQ on that Compliance Guide states that
[each] separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, and more than one person may be held responsible for violations ⌠and boy, would I love to see that actually happen.
But for now⌠Iâll be happy with just a full stop on those advertising emails, please. And weâll see if that just-in-case 60-day thing gets honored by next week.
Oh, and one more thing; in the inbox screenshot above, I followed the unsubscribe link on the 4/21 email, which led me to a defunct URL⌠which proooobably bricks 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and the âfunctioningâ bit of 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(A). Oh, and 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(A)(ii), since I checked that unsubscribe link well within 30 days of initial receipt of that 4/21 email.
The 4/21 emailâs unsubscribe link doesnât⌠even⌠work.
I took a look at the URLs for both and found that the parameter strings for the 4/21 email does not match those from the prior two emails. The strings for the 3/30 and 3/27 email match more chars except the last 20 or so, but still lead to the usual site. The 4/21 emailâs link, however, either poorly formats the params based on my inbox/email metadata, or has other bugs, and stops matching the params string for the last 163 chars. I havenât reproduced the links for security reasons, but Iâve got record of them to fuel my own rage.