i tried to update my credit card so they won’t send me daily fucking emails that i “owe” them $30 (because a gym membership definitely needs to be a cOnTraCt, sure, sure), but the website didn’t work, so I tried calling their “automated” system, whereupon after entering my info to the robot, it gave up and connected me to a guy who i had to speak do and do it all over again.
then they made the poor guy literally ask at the end ‘are you satisfied with my service today’
This is why I used Privacy for my gym membership. They tried to charge me during Covid when they were closed and I just turned off the card they were using.
Also, check out https://port87.com
It automatically sorts things based on subaddresses, so you can give the gym [email protected], and you’ll get a label named beefcakegym where all their emails go. Then if they pester you, you can just block that address.
Full disclosure: I built and run Port87.
This is built into some email services, where you with [email protected], you can set the label to whatever you want and it all goes to [email protected]. unfortunately many sites will incorrectly claim that + is invalid in am address.
Yeah, Microsoft is a notable one that does that. That’s why I made it so Port87 supports both the plus and the dash. I haven’t found any place that doesn’t accept a dash in an email address.
Lots of places support the subaddressing, but I don’t know of any others that are built around it like Port87. Like, where all email to a subaddress goes to a matching label automatically.
Automatic sorting is a nice addition.
In practice very few places accept the plus sign as a valid email
And if they don’t block it outright, this trick is rather well known and easy to filter out. It takes a minute to write a function that removes anything from the + to the @.
Gmail (and maybe others) ignores periods in the address. Only use labels in combination with extra or removed periods, and filter any address without a label and the wrong periods. If they remove the label, it goes to the bin.
What do disposable email addresses and spam filters have to do with canceling a gym membership? I don’t see anything on that page referring to banking or credit card transactions.
OP mentioned getting emails, but the topic at hand was changing their card, not hiding from the emails. Any email service is capable of blocking a domain, why would a special email service be of any use in this case? They weren’t spam emails, they were missed payment reminders.
Blocking emails doesn’t stop the payments, either.
So you off handedly throw out “turn off your card” as if that’s the simple and obvious solution, with no other detrimental effects, and then tried to shoehorn a plug for your email service into this?
You just saw the words “daily emails”, the tiniest sliver of a possible opening to plug your thing, and you took it, regardless of it was on topic or not.
In essence, you dropped spam for your spam filtering service.
I was actually talking about my own experience canceling a gym membership. As mentioned, I used a Privacy card, which is locked to one vendor. You can turn off that specific card, and nothing else is affected. That’s how I canceled my own gym membership, when I couldn’t do it in person, because the gym was closed during Covid.
I mentioned my email service because it has a very similar feature to Privacy, I’ve also used it when going as a guest to a different gym, and OP mentioned getting constant emails from the gym. This relates to both their and my experience.
That’s why I was talking about Privacy. Turning off a Privacy card does stop the payments.
If you’re unfamiliar with Privacy, it’s basically like a disposable email service, but for credit cards. You only use a Privacy card with one vendor, so there aren’t any downsides to turning it off.
If you think that my comment is unrelated to OP’s situation, then I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe try canceling a gym membership and see for yourself.