My (failed) attempt to unsubscribe from UnderArmour emails

About 6 months ago, I started getting promotional emails from UnderArmour in my personal email address, even though I never bought anything from them nor subscribed to any promotional newsletter.

So, what’s the deal? I just need to click on the included unsubscribe button, right?

Well… it’s not that easy, since that button takes to a web page that doesn’t work.

Gmail filters to the rescue

Now what? I can’t unsubscribe and I am getting about multiple emails every week filling my inbox. I could just mark those emails as spam and move on with my life, but since Gmail has been throwing some important emails into the spam folder and I check it regularly to make sure I don’t miss something important; I didn’t want to see UnderArmour’s emails anymore.

The workaround I found was to use filters that automatically delete all emails from underarmour@e.underarmour.com and prevent them from ever reaching my inbox again.

I was satisfied with this solution since I didn’t get to see those emails anymore, but all this time I was annoyed with the fact that I never gave them my email and they wouldn’t let me unsubscribe.

Investigating the broken unsubscribe link

Being a curious student and bothered by this, my only option was to look into this and stop those emails from coming in.

The unsubscribe button in the email takes you to trk.e.underarmour.com but responds with a 302 code and redirects to pages.e.underarmour.com, so let’s keep going.

The next URL to test is pages.e.underarmour.com, and at first glance, it seems that this is related to DNS.

Initially, I thought it might have something to do with my PiHole since it sometimes breaks some pages, but even with PiHole deactivated I couldn’t access the page that would supposedly let me unsubscribe.

The missing record

A quick search in securitytrails.com shows that an A record for pages.e.underarmour.com indeed existed, but was deleted 2 years ago.

So now what? It seemed like a dead-end but there was one last thing I wanted to try.

Searching all underarmour.com’s subdomains

Fortunately, there are websites that already keep track of domains like this one. The only problem is that there are 344 subdomains for underarmour.com.

I tried the ones that included the word email or some variant of it, and after trying only 3 subdomains I stumbled across one that seemed promising: pages.emails.underarmour.com.

Then, I replaced pages.e.underarmour.com (the link that the unsubscribe button sent to) with pages.email.underarmour.com, keeping the path of the URL.

Et voilà, I could finally unsubscribe from UnderArmour emails. Or not…

Wrapping up

I want to give UnderArmour the benefit of the doubt and to think that they just made a mistake and were redirected to the wrong subdomain, but it seems that there are other people with this problem. I have continued to receive promotional emails even though I have submitted the form to unsubscribe multiple times.

More and more companies are adopting these kinds of tactics to retain users, but for what purpose? After this experience, I would never want to buy something from them; in fact, I would try to dissuade anyone from doing it.

What should we do to stop receiving your emails, UnderArmor?