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

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

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.

> If you know someone on the 24 Hour Fitness engineering team, please share this with them. It's a one-line fix.

One man's bug is another man's feature.

Applied to a job at Oracle 3 years ago. For a couple of years their unsubscribe link went to a broken page . Now they totally ignore my unsubscription choice and keep sending me job offers anyway

If 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, big email providers like gmail should automatically mark all of their emails as spam by default until they fix it.

If anyone from Shop.app is here, your unsubscribe does not work either (maybe due to VPN usage).

But that's okay, Fastmail now automatically routes it to the spam folder where it belongs.

additionally:

Interesting, I set my email as a backup authentication for a luddite friend's Comcast email account, and I just discovered spam from Xfinity in my spam folder. Shame on you Xfinity Comcast.

The problem:

My understanding is the CAN-SPAM Act violations can only be prosecuted by states Attorney Generals, there is no civil action available.

Sounds like they have not got CORS set up on their servers either? Surely it should not allow mutating requests from random origins not on an allowlist?

That’s the best public service I’ve seen in a long time.

> OneTrust is literally a consent management platform focused on regulatory compliance, and 24 Hour Fitness is using it to violate consent regulations.

I mean, OneTrust's entire raison d'etre is to violate consent regulations with flimsy deniability.

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 to work, beyond the usual spam filtering, is to setup email on your own domain, and give every company a unique address. The moment you want to stop receiving email from them, you simply block their address. This deals both with the original company, and with anyone they've sold your contact information to.