Attempting to unsubscribe from a newsletter results in me being “temporarily blocked”
One good day I wound up with a subscription to a site named Schwans, and I was receiving purchase orders from a guy named “John D.” for some reason. So, naturally, I tried to unsubscribe. I got an error message saying:
Sorry, you have been temporarily blocked
We have implemented new measures to help protect against fraudulent activity. Something unusual was detected with your access to schwans.com and you’ve been temporarily blocked. Please contact our team at 1-888-724-9267 and provide the Ray ID shown below. We’ll have you back online as quickly as possible. Thank you for your understanding as we continue to defend and protect customers from ever-changing cybersecurity threats.
Odd thing, so I go into the main website and unsubscribe manually. All fine and dandy until I start getting these emails AGAIN because Schwans decided to rebrand as Yelloh and that apparently reset their unsubscriptions and back to the same shenanigans we go!
Most companies use a service to send their newsletters. You should be able to find the IP address from the email headers and then find the abuse email for that company. Email them, tell them you are unable to unsubscribe and their customer is thus sending you spam. Attach the email headers and 90% of the time they will take action (at least from my informal observation when I used to do this).