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

123 points| daem | 9 days ago |ahmedkaddoura.com

53 comments

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StilesCrisis|9 days ago

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

al_borland|9 days ago

I would go so far as to say no one has ever liked GPT text.

peddling-brink|9 days ago

1. I agree with you. The standard GPT voice is grating in its ability to use so many words without saying anything.

2. I also see it as a modern tower of Babylon. A linguistic equalizer of sorts.

daem|8 days ago

Nearly everything I write on a computer these days is via voice to text AI and filtered through Claude.

You’re right though, upon re-read there are some places in this article where my authentic voice doesn’t come through. Re-writing.

iinnPP|9 days ago

[deleted]

illusive4080|9 days ago

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.

estimator7292|9 days ago

If anyone ever prompts me for a review or leaves a "rebate for review" card in the box, they get 1 star.

rationalist|9 days ago

Walmart should also fix where someone can create an account with someone else's email address (no email address validation).

bob1029|9 days ago

> 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.

yellow_lead|9 days ago

"The marketing team says fixing this bug will negatively impact their numbers, closing."

MiddleEndian|9 days ago

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.

Loxicon|8 days ago

Reading the comments the author is basically "one with ai" where his life is deeply integrated with ai agents.

I have a friend exactly like that. And he has being doing it so long that he cannot even respond to a discord without asking AI "what do you think? what should I say? what do you think they mean?"

Full NPC mode, and it's really sad and scary.

You lose the ability to think. You lose all differentiation.

daem|6 days ago

My first OpenClaw agent was born on February 7, 2026. I now have 3 claws and am planning for more. They have catalyzed my self-actualization and improved my critical thinking. I’ve never felt so alive.

I don’t see what’s sad or scary about this. AI agents are the next iPhone.

rationalist|9 days ago

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.

troupo|9 days ago

> 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.

mattlondon|9 days ago

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?

bigDinosaur|9 days ago

CORS has nothing to do with (dis)allowing 'mutating requests from random origins' on the server unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean. The origin is a browser concept.

junkblocker|9 days ago

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

RickJWagner|9 days ago

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

orsenthil|8 days ago

Is there any un-subscribe anything service ?

imiric|9 days ago

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.

left-struck|9 days ago

Nah, unsubscribe links absolutely work. I’m religious about unsubscribing the first time I get any email notification I don’t want from anyone. The result is I basically get no unwanted emails unless I sign of for something new. Compared to basically every other email inbox I’ve ever seen where people don’t unsubscribe… yeah it’s super clear that it works.

I also use email aliases for every single account I have so if my email somehow leaks and I’m getting spam, i know exactly what account leaked it. That’s basically never happened though.

The only problem I have with unsubscribe links is that sometimes the website is straight up broken, like the link is dead or the page unresponsive, and I wonder about how far down fixing that issue is on the engineering team’s todo.

daem|9 days ago

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 a challenge to get the emails to stop.

daem|9 days ago

from 2025-10-26 to 2026-01-29 (the day I wrote this article), no_reply@24hourfitness.com sent me 40 spam emails.

In the 33 days since I wrote this article, no_reply@24hourfitness.com sent me zero.

nojs|9 days ago

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

iamacyborg|9 days ago

> 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.