Yes, all these "it'll take X days to remove this" responses are an excuse. These things should be automatic.

Moonpig won't stop reminding me of the upcoming birthday of someone who has died - I have to wait 2 weeks for something which is painful.

What, you think a database can just, like, delete a row, just like that? Don't be ridiculous.

"Hi there, my name is Little Bobby Tables! Opt out of THIS!"

I think it's because some emails might have already been sent and be sitting in the outbound mail queues of various mail servers. Some of those might retry for up to 14 days.

Hence, 14 days to be sure you won't get any more emails.

I don’t buy that sorry. Sounds plausible but isn’t an excuse.

I can’t imagine many mail servers will retry up to 14 days unless the spammers configured it to do so. That’s a very uncommon length of time.

And it’s totally within the spammers’ control to choose and/or configure mail servers with a shorter duration. Just how important do they think their spam is!