In the click-button age, it still takes between 36 hours and forever to unsubscribe from a mailing list

How is your celebration party going?

Nothing to do with politics: I’m talking about holding a shindig to hail Global Encryption Day. No doubt you cyphertexted your mates some asymmetric algorithms to let them know, and now they’ve rocked up to your backdoor in party mood with hash. I bet you can’t wait for everyone to throw their keys into the bowl.

Or maybe you take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.

No such cryptographic fun for me, I’m afraid. I am still recovering from last night’s bash to celebrate the end of Global Pop Tart Memorial Month, and I have a doctor’s certificate authority to prove it. And this was already hot on the heels of recent wild all-nighters to mark Northern Hemisphere Bus Driver’s Left Shoe Week and International Tuesday Afternoon of the Lithium 3V CR2032.

Since I will be spending the day in pyjamas, I may as well use my off-duty time to do some autumn cleaning.

I decide to tidy up my email boxes. Specifically, I decide to unsubscribe from some lists that keep sending me unwanted promotions.

Yes, I do understand that it is poor net hygiene to try to unsubscribe from emails that I did not subscribe to in the first place. These are probably spam sprayed out through an email address generator/randomiser, and clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ will just confirm my existence and copy my address to the spammer’s ‘confirmed’ mailing list which, in line with mainstream industry practice, will be sold to other spammers. So I plan only to unsubscribe from newsletters and stores that look genuine and those with whom I remember having registered at some point in my youth.

First, though, I will mark the rest as spam because that’ll be more fun.

That said, I wish there was a way of dealing with unsolicited email that was more satisfying. Clicking the ‘spam’ button just isn’t punitive enough. It feels like you’re letting them get away with it. Like a school teacher giving a badly behaved pupil permission to visit the toilet mid-lesson just to get rid of them. Why can’t email programs mark spam more demonstratively? I dunno, such as showing an animation ripping the spam email to shreds and an animated character with my profile photo as the head repeatedly punching a spambot character in the face before dancing on its grave?

Once this task has been done, I turn to solicited junk mail.

I decide to halt marketing messages from Superdry. I’d only registered with them so I could order one of their micron-thin, plasticky jackets for a nephew’s birthday present about 10 years ago. Clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ link takes me to a web page that confirms my “marketing choice” (I love the idea of the digital equivalent of me saying “please sod off“ as being a “marketing choice”) but also states that it would take “a few days” after the request before the promotional emails cease.

Apparently there are a whole load of logistical reasons why it takes several days to be removed from a mailing list. One can only wonder what these might be.

While I am, in fact, wondering what these might be, I read that Amazon is planning to offer same-day delivery across the US for retails brands including PacSun, Diesel, GNC and… oh look… Superdry.

So I could literally order a binliner masquerading as a windcheater and have it shipped from a storehouse and delivered to any front door in mainland USA that very same day – an almost incomprehensible logistical nightmare by the sound of it. But it is not possible for a checkbox next to my name to be unticked – an entirely hands-free, no-human-required, fully automated digital-only action – for several days.

Grumbling that such absurdity smacks of artificial deliberation, I continue unsubscribing from stuff with a vengeance.

Gone are the days when you could unsubscribe and have done with it. No, these days everyone insists that you give them a reason why you want to be taken off their list. Now you are the naughty schoolboy, forced to come up with a plausible explanation for your behaviour.

Except you are not permitted to give the actual reason: you must choose from one of a set of pre-written bullshit excuses for wanting to unsubscribe. You can’t tell them the truth, that you’ve had enough of their crap. No, you have to pick from a set of pejorative insulting statements, all which are poorly disguised variants of “I’m an idiot and compulsive masturbator and do not know any better”.

Nor is there an in-between option. You either unsubscribe from everything or agree to be inundated with repetitive, irrelevant promotional mailturds. For example, I do not particularly want to unsubscribe from the BA Executive Club emails but their email server is bonkers. They don’t send out promotional mails very often but when they do, they send me the same email 13 times, all with the same date and time stamp.

At the bottom of each email there is an ‘Unsubscribe’ link but that’s not really the issue. What I need is a ‘Do not send me 13 identical emails on the same day’ button.

Taking Superdry’s delaying tactics and running with them, Huawei puts off unsubscribe requests in a very special way. I click ‘Unsubscribe’ and I am taken to a web page that insists I pick from a set of reasons for unsubscribing before I am taken off their mailing list. Give no reason? Get no removal.

I click on the gloriously understated “The emails do not interest me” radio button… whereupon the page pops up a message: “An error has occurred. Please try later.”

I did but it produces the same message every time. I seem to remember trying to unsubscribe from Huawei emails months ago, and it produced exactly the same error back then too. Funny, that.

If I was a conspiracist, I’d claim it was deliberate. If it was in conciliatory mood, I’d say it was proof of technical incompetence. Actually, I’m quite sure it is neither: it’s probably a genuine error and they could fix it… if they could be arsed.

The core problem is – just as with the 36-hour delay on unsubscribe requests – the businesses concerned simply couldn’t give a flying fuck what you want.