It took us 4 reconsideration requests before our unnatural link building penalty was lifted. In order to have the manually penalty revoked, we downloaded all our backlink lists from Moz, Bing and Google webmaster tools imported them into a Google doc and remove the duplicates. We then contacted every site and made a not of the contact details along with the date in a new column on the Google doc, we would then re visit the sites the following week and email them again. After 3 attempts we would but : unable to contact webmaster for link removal added URL to disinvow list.
Once we had gone through the whole list, which did take a long time we submitted the disinvow list first, then submitted our reconsideration request explains what we had done since our last request and include the link to the Google docs as the spam team can access this and see all the hard work you have done.
Good luck with it, and i hope you recover soon
