The Mailroom: what an operator sends to your account
A gambling account is talked to constantly, and almost none of it is an advert. This desk is about the messages an operator sends to an account: which kinds exist, what each one is allowed to change, what each has to contain, how it travels, when it has to arrive, and what can prove it did.
- samples
- 8 invented
- messages in 30 days
- 50
- kinds of message
- 5
- channels
- 5
One receipt on one rail. The carrier takes 0.9 seconds to the second node; the reader takes 41 minutes 21 seconds to the third, and another 29 minutes 38 seconds to the fourth - 2,757 times the carrier's time. The open band between the last two nodes is the part of the journey no channel can speed up, and the post lane on the same message would put the second node two and a quarter days to the right and delete the third entirely.
Forty cells, twenty-four permitted and sixteen refused, with one channel per kind treated as mandatory. The refusals are about length, permanence and evidence far more often than about cost: only two of the sixteen are refused because the channel charges for the message.
A gambling operator sends an account several different things, and they are not interchangeable: receipts of what happened, marketing, service notes, security alerts and legal notices. Only the marketing can be switched off - the rest continue because the account needs them, and the terms usually permit them without consent. A message is evidence and it can start a clock, but on its own it changes nothing: the change it announces comes from the terms or from the reader’s own action.
What the samples show
The desk's central figure is one month: fifty messages sent to one account in thirty days, of which twelve could be stopped and thirty-eight could not, across five kinds and five channels. Every figure anywhere on this site is derived from that month and from seven further samples, and the arithmetic is shown beside each one so a reader can re-derive it rather than take it.
Two findings do most of the work. First, the switch a reader reaches for - the one word at the foot of a message - covers twelve of those fifty messages and cannot touch the other thirty-eight, because a receipt is not a promotion and an operator is not required to ask before sending one. Second, the word "sent" in an operator's own log is not the same event as the message appearing on a phone: on the samples, arrival is evidenced for forty-eight of fifty and reading for twenty-one of fifty, and the two messages sent by post have no arrival evidence at all.
None of the samples describes a real company, a real account or a real message. They are eight invented sets of counts, channels and durations, defined on this page, and every other figure on the site is derived from them.
Eight samples
Fifty messages in thirty days, split by kind.
- messages
- 50
- marketing
- 12
- the rest
- 38
What one opt-out covers, and what continues without it.
- stoppable
- 12 of 50
- continues
- 38 of 50
- share stopped
- 24.0%
How the fifty were carried, and the one channel each kind must allow.
- channels
- 5
- kinds
- 5
- mandatory
- 1 each
The time each channel takes, from send to arrival.
- 0.9 s
- post
- 2 d 6 h
- ratio
- 216,000
What an operator's own message log keeps about each send.
- fields
- 12
- kept
- 9
- not kept
- 3
Sent, arrived and read, as three separate counts.
- sent
- 50
- arrival evidence
- 48
- read evidence
- 21
Two addresses of record, and the day a change takes to bite.
- addresses
- 2
- change takes
- 24 h
- caught
- 1.7 messages
What the same message costs on five different channels.
- 0.0004
- SMS
- 0.0410
- post
- 0.6200
Two further samples are defined on the pages that use them: sample I on the notice windows and sample J on what a message can change on its own.
A month of messages
Sample A is the clearest place to start, because the split by kind is what decides whether the switch at the foot of a message does anything at all.
| Kind | Sent | Share | Switchable |
|---|---|---|---|
| receipts of what happened | 30 | 60.0% | no |
| marketing | 12 | 24.0% | yes |
| service notes | 4 | 8.0% | no |
| security alerts | 2 | 4.0% | no |
| legal notices | 2 | 4.0% | no |
| one account, thirty days | 50 | 100.0% | 12 of 50 |
Sent, arrived, read
The second figure is the one readers most often assume away. Three different counts are routinely treated as one, and they are not the same event.