After briefly using their service I decided to stop using Evernote, for me having a personal wiki that I host myself and can edit on my iTelephone and my computers made much more sense, plus it’s free and doesn’t need extra software. So this morning I severed my final ties and unsubscribed to Evernote’s email newsletters. When I did, I got the message you see above.
Leaving aside the issue with email newsletters being an archaic and outdated model for sending out information in a world of web feeds like RSS, why do companies that add you to their email newsletter mailing lists always require such an inordinate amount of time to unsubscribe you? Evernote claims here that they need up to two weeks to delete me from their database; an action that on any other database would only takes milliseconds. There is no technological reason I can see for this.
So in rhetorical style we must ask ourselves: why do they do this? Is it so they can keep you on their list for an extra two weeks and send you more advertising? Is it like an opt-out system that some laws now require, but one that guarantees a minimum of two weeks of advertising to unsuspecting people?
Again it wouldn’t be so annoying if this kind of silly behaviour were only exhibited by a few select companies, but virtually everybody does it. I wonder if there’s a blacklist for companies that pull these kinds of stunts?
By the way, I’m typing this blog post from my new Unicomp buckling spring keyboard. Just in case you wanted to know :-)
2 weeks does seem a little excessive.
I find your comment about email newsletters being outdated rather silly.
Sending newsletters through the post might be old fashioned and yes you might have been using the internet for 20 years but for a very high population the internet and email is *very* new.
Perhaps they quote a time of 2 weeks just to cover their asses? I mean if they said you will be un subscribed instantly, and then *you* received an email from them 20 mins later you would be very mad I expect?
You are nerd but 90% of the interwebs are not, Evernote will try and appeal to the masses, not the geeks and nerds first, they cannot base their company model on appealing to the nerdy 10% first, nice as it may be it just would not make sense for them.
Mike
My playful jabs at email newsletters and Evernote were auxiliary to my primary point that unsubscription times of two weeks are ridiculous, I’m glad at least we’re in agreement about this :).
Despite what you suggest, I would be far from mad if I received a message 20 minutes after unsubscribing; if they stated it may take as long that’d be fine. 20 minutes is far more acceptable than 2 weeks.
That’s okay you find my newsletter comment silly, I find your comment silly too :). I see more and more people giving up on email; most of my “less tech literate” friends (whom you’re specifically talking about) communicate online almost exclusively through social networks like Facebook now, including people of my father’s generation. Most are also finding their news this way too. Email for these people is dying, and newsletters will be too. I still take part in email newsgroup discussions and IRC, but I’m not pretending that the general public does now too.
I agree Evernote makes much more sense to this same group of people, but as I said in the post, "for me" I found using a wiki made more sense because it was free and didn’t require extra software. Each to their own.
Good one Ruben.
I agree about the 2 weeks.
I also agree about email. Besides being ineffective, email is broken. Spam filtering sends a large portion of subscribed bulk emails to a spam folder and most people have no idea what a spam folder is or how to mark someone as a safe sender. RSS and social sites, exactly as you mentioned, generate a much higher response rate than email at this point.
Hi -
I can give you a little more specific information about Evernote’s unsubscribe mechanism.
When you click unsubscribe using the form above your account is immediately modified, we will no longer send new newsletters to you. The reason we give the “two week” caveat is it takes about 2 weeks to send an email to all our users. Turns out sending email is fairly slow when you have a large number of users. There’s a chance that you may unsubscribe and we’re in the middle of sending messages. We can’t remove your name from an email list currently in process.
We preferred to give a conservative estimate in the rare case that your unsubscribe request overlapped with a current emailing. We don’t want you to think we ignored your request. We understand that it’s critical to respect our users wishes and know that it’s exasperating to unsubscribe only to feel powerless in stopping the flood of emails.
Regarding the utility of emails, while no one likes spam, and we do have a blog with RSS, not all users are so sophisticated and we’ve found the periodic messages to our users has the broadest reach and is often the most effective way of informing users about new features. We give our users both options.
Thanks for your post and thanks for trying Evernote.
Fair enough, thank you for your comment Philip :)