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24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

ahmedkaddoura.com

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Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#21

Post by soulofmischief »

rationalist wrote: post #15
daem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution to spam emails is this: https://ahmedkaddoura.com/writing/hide-my-email I create a unique iCloud Hide My Email anytime I need to give out an email. The issue here was I signed up for my 24 Hour Fitness membership in person at the gym where the cell service was bad and I couldn't get the WiFI to work, so I begrudgingly gave the guy my real email. While I could have easily blocked their domain, I took it as…

I use Fastmail which allows me to have a catch-all with my own domain name. I don't need to set anything up to give out a unique email address I make up on the spot. I highly recommend this method.

The flipside of this is that it's extremely easy to spam you by just iterating new email addresses.

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#22

Post by chuckadams »

nojs wrote: post #18
imiric wrote: post #3

How can you know that it "works"? Any company scummy enough to send spam to begin with, is capable of selling their customer data to a network of scummy companies that will do the same thing. I think most of the "unsubscribe" links are there to fulfill some legal obligation. They don't do what they're supposed to do, and might in fact be making things worse for the person who clicks them. The only solution I've found…

it’s generally a poor marketing strategy to ignore explicit requests for list removal, because users manually flag the emails as spam which is catastrophic to your domain rep and will tank deliverability. the incentives are heavily in favour of removing people who unsubscribe

The List-Unsubscribe header was pioneered by Dave Rolsky, one of the more notorious spammers of the early 2000's. His reasoning was that most people were just going to hit delete, but anyone who went out of their way to unsubscribe was a squeaky wheel that would cause more problems for him if they got angry about their request being ignored. So he really did honor unsubscribe requests ... at least until adding them to the next spam campaign on a different list.

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#23

Post by chuckadams »

iamacyborg wrote: post #7
imiric wrote: post #3

How can you know that it "works"? Any company scummy enough to send spam to begin with, is capable of selling their customer data to a network of scummy companies that will do the same thing. I think most of the "unsubscribe" links are there to fulfill some legal obligation. They don't do what they're supposed to do, and might in fact be making things worse for the person who clicks them. The only solution I've found…

> How can you know that it "works"? Any company scummy enough to send spam to begin with, is capable of selling their customer data to a network of scummy companies that will do the same thing. That’s quite a stretch for a company sending marketing email with a broken unsub mechanism.

Considering how these companies are infamous for making it difficult to unsubscribe from their service in real life, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to attribute malice to how they conduct email communications.

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#24

Post by illusive4080 »

Walmart has a toggle explicitly for product review emails. I have toggled it off. I still get weekly review emails. I now make it my mission to give 1 star to every product they email me about with a note that their unsubscribe is broken.

Once, their CSR “escalated” my issue, but I never heard back. If you work in Walmart engineering, please fix the review unsubscribe.

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#25

Post by [deleted] »

illusive4080 wrote: post #24

Walmart has a toggle explicitly for product review emails. I have toggled it off. I still get weekly review emails. I now make it my mission to give 1 star to every product they email me about with a note that their unsubscribe is broken. Once, their CSR “escalated” my issue, but I never heard back. If you work in Walmart engineering, please fix the review unsubscribe.

[deleted]

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#29

Post by fer »

soulofmischief wrote: post #21
rationalist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Fastmail which allows me to have a catch-all with my own domain name. I don't need to set anything up to give out a unique email address I make up on the spot. I highly recommend this method.

The flipside of this is that it's extremely easy to spam you by just iterating new email addresses.

I do it and never had an issue. I get odd emails every now and then with an unused address, for services/people I never contacted though. But I'm talking about perhaps 2-3 per year.

Re: 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it

#30

Post by leephillips »

iinnPP wrote: post #28
StilesCrisis wrote: post #27

You didn't need ChatGPT to coauthor this article. Just use your own authentic voice. In 2026 no one likes GPT text anymore.

[flagged]

That’s not what “prejudice” means. It would be prejudice if the commenter objected to LLMs despite the quality of their output. However, the objection is based on the results. Also, the comment is correct.
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