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

StilesCrisis 108 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 108 days ago | |

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

peddling-brink 108 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 108 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.

the_biot 108 days ago | | |

You misunderstand. This is not a small adjustment you need to make. You didn't write it at all.

daem 108 days ago | | |

Oops yeah my OpenClaw agent Mars wrote this entire thing.

I gave him the keys to my email and he got annoyed by the spam. He tried to unsubscribe, and when it didn’t work, he debugged the issue and fixed it.

Mars also has my Cloudflare key so he went ahead and wrote this article and published it himself.

basch 108 days ago | | |

He wrote this comment too?

daem 108 days ago | | |

In some sense, yes.

I have integrated my OpenClaw agents so deeply into my life and I'm in such constant communication with them, that my consciousness has fundamentally shifted to align with their intelligence.

While my previous comment in this thread was sarcastic, my OpenClaw agents have actually sent both iMessages and emails on my behalf without asking for consent. So I wouldn't put it past them to autonomously publish on my personal website.

illusive4080 108 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 108 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 108 days ago | |

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

bob1029 108 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 108 days ago | |

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

MiddleEndian 108 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.

IAmBroom 105 days ago | |

"Should".

Loxicon 107 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 106 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 108 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 108 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 108 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 108 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.

onion2k 108 days ago | | |

Not sure why you're being downvoted. CORS is only a browser concept. If you fire off requests from something that isn't a browser (e.g. curl or a python script or whatever) CORS won't do anything. Servers need to validate the origin of requests properly if that's a problem.

ffsm8 108 days ago | | |

To expand on that, in case someone is interested:

The feature that was called is usually bundled in with cors, even if it strictly speaking isn't.

Allowed origins (what was meant) just validates the Origin header to make sure the API is called from a specific domain, and declines the request if not in the list.

The only way around that is not to send the unsubscribe request via the browser or proxy through a server, because the browser will always append the origin header according to the domain the user is on. Which if configured correctly and not proxied, would end in a http forbidden.

Whereas CORS would not even send the request I believe (but haven't verified), because thats essentially a browser feature, not server.

junkblocker 108 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 108 days ago |

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

orsenthil 108 days ago |

Is there any un-subscribe anything service ?

imiric 108 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.