Why does a weekly email from Flickr arrive a little later each year?

June 17, 2019 4:27 AM

I’ve had a Flickr account in gadzoinks, probably since 2005 or 6. One thing I’ve noticed is that during that through the years the “new posts from friends” email has slowly drifted from arriving on Thursday, to Friday, Saturday, Sunday and now comes on Monday. Does anyone happen to know why that’s happened? As in, what programming choice, or variable, has led to this slow drift.
posted by Kattullus to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Marketing automation systems throttle sends to a certain number of emails per second. If the list has increased over time and it sends in reverse-added-to-list order (newest addresses first), I could see this migration happening.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 4:34 AM on June 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Best answer: They might have a continuous process to drip-feed emails into a queue based on the time of the previous send: “Send new post reminders to everyone who hasn't gotten one since 7 days ago” will cause the space between emails to be slightly more than 7.000 days. Over time that could cause the message to drift forward.
posted by migurski at 7:08 PM on June 17, 2019

Response by poster: That sounds very plausible to me. Thank you!
posted by Kattullus at 2:03 PM on June 19, 2019