Spam bombing. Unable to unsubscribe
This article is based on something that happened to me a few weeks ago.
During the summer of 2026, I started getting bombarded with dozens of emails from an e-commerce company promoting its platform for selling products.
Fun fact: I'm not a seller, so the service was of absolutely zero interest to me.
Normally, getting rid of marketing emails isn't particularly difficult. You unsubscribe, block the sender, create a filter, or report the messages as spam.
In this case, none of those worked.
The unsubscribe link was present in the email footer, but clicking it simply didn't stop the emails.
Reporting the messages as spam and blocking the sender wasn't particularly useful either, because the sender kept changing.
Different display names. Different email addresses. Same advertising.
The company name wasn't consistently present in the subject either, so filtering based on that wasn't reliable.
Eventually, I ended up blocking every email coming from wixmails.
That finally worked.
But I was slightly annoyed that the solution to unwanted marketing from one company was effectively blocking an entire mailing domain that could perfectly well be used by legitimate senders.
Time to act
At that point, blocking the emails didn't feel like enough.
I operate websites and online services myself, and I have to deal with GDPR requirements just like everyone else.
So I have very little patience for businesses treating privacy rules as something optional simply because enforcement is slow or unlikely.
First, I sent a PEC, the Italian certified email system, to the Italian Data Protection Authority.
I'm still waiting for a response.
Perhaps they'll get back to me before the heat death of the universe.
Then I went to the company's Trustpilot page and left a one-star review describing my experience with their marketing emails and their rather creative interpretation of the unsubscribe process.
I also included evidence supporting what I was saying.
For two months now, I’ve been continually receiving unsolicited marketing emails from this company, even though I never signed up for them.
I’ve tried several times to use the unsubscribe links in the emails, but they haven’t worked for me—the messages keep coming. The sender addresses change frequently, to the point that I’ve had to create several automatic filters just to keep my inbox from filling up with their spam.
The most serious issue, in my opinion, isn’t even receiving an unsolicited marketing email in the first place; it’s not having a working way to say “stop contacting me” and have that request honored.
After two months, nothing has changed, so I filed a complaint with the Italian Data Protection Authority.
Personally, I’d avoid buying from a company that handles email addresses and unsubscribe requests this way.
The review gets reported
The next day, the company reported my review to Trustpilot as containing “illegal content”.
Trustpilot temporarily removed it while reviewing the report.
A few days later, however, the review was restored.
As far as Trustpilot was concerned, it did not violate their rules.
So far, so good.
Then things became more interesting.
The following day, the company publicly replied to my review:
We have absolutely no idea what you are referring to. Which Wix platform? ACME does not use Wix. The emails you mentioned certainly do not come from ACME.it or ACME.com and were not sent by our company. Your claims are therefore completely false, unfounded, and seriously damaging to our reputation. We request that you remove the review within 24 hours. Otherwise, we reserve the right to protect our image and our rights in the appropriate venues by taking the necessary legal action.
Apparently, somewhere out there, someone had generously decided to spend their time and money sending unsolicited marketing emails promoting ACME entirely on ACME's behalf and without their knowledge.
How charitable.
Legal threats work surprisingly well
At this point, I checked Trustpilot's rules.
Trustpilot explicitly tells users to report businesses that pressure reviewers into removing their reviews.
So I took screenshots of the company's response and opened a support ticket.
But there was another problem.
I had no interest whatsoever in finding out whether the company would actually follow through with its threat.
Maybe they never would.
Maybe I had more than enough evidence to defend what I had written.
Maybe their legal position was weak.
None of that really mattered.
Keeping a one-star review online simply wasn't worth the possibility of spending money and time dealing with lawyers over some spam emails.
That's the imbalance.
For a company, writing “remove this within 24 hours or we may take legal action” costs almost nothing.
For the person receiving that message, deciding to ignore it may carry a completely different level of risk.
Especially in countries where civil litigation can be slow, stressful, and expensive.
So I deleted the review.
Trustpilot's catch-22
The next day, Trustpilot replied to my support ticket:
Since you’ve already deleted the review, we can’t take action regarding the company’s response at this time.
Future policy violations: If a similar issue arises in the future, please report it while the review or response is still active on the platform so our moderation team can take appropriate action.
And that's where the story becomes much more interesting than a company sending spam.
Trustpilot asks users to report businesses that pressure them into deleting reviews.
But in my case, once that pressure had actually worked and I deleted the review, Trustpilot told me they could no longer act on the company's response.
It's a rather unfortunate catch-22.
The platform can protect you from pressure to remove a review, as long as you don't actually give in to that pressure.
But giving in is precisely what a legal threat is designed to make you do.
The company never needed Trustpilot to remove my review
This is the part I hadn't really considered before this happened.
The company didn't need to convince Trustpilot that my review was false.
In fact, they tried.
They reported it as illegal content, Trustpilot reviewed it, and the review was restored.
From the moderation system's perspective, the process had worked.
The review survived.
What removed it wasn't moderation.
It was me.
And all it took was making the cost of keeping the review online potentially higher than the value of leaving it there.
That distinction matters.
We often think about review manipulation as something involving fake five-star ratings, bots, purchased reviews, or companies somehow convincing platforms to delete criticism.
But there is another, much simpler mechanism.
You don't necessarily need to delete someone's negative review.
You can convince the reviewer that keeping it online isn't worth the trouble.
The end result is exactly the same.
What I would do differently
If something similar happened again, I would change the order in which I handled it.
First, I would immediately archive everything: the original emails, headers, unsubscribe attempts, screenshots, Trustpilot reports, and company responses.
Then I would report the pressure to Trustpilot while both the review and the company's response were still online.
Only after receiving a response from Trustpilot would I decide what to do with the review itself.
Obviously, that doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
A user still has to decide whether keeping a negative review online is worth potentially dealing with legal threats over it.
But at least it avoids accidentally removing the very content the platform needs in order to investigate what happened.
Conclusion
What bothers me about this story isn't really the spam anymore.
It's how easy it was to make a negative review disappear.
The company didn't need to convince Trustpilot that my review was false.
Trustpilot had already restored it.
They only needed to make keeping it online more trouble than it was worth.
And that's the problem.
For a company, threatening legal action may cost little more than writing a reply.
For an individual, even when they believe everything they wrote is true and can document it, the alternative may be spending time and money defending a one-star review in court.
There is very little upside to taking that risk.
So I deleted mine.
Trustpilot explicitly asks users to report businesses that pressure them into removing reviews. Yet, in my case, after that pressure had worked and I had deleted the review, Trustpilot told me it could no longer take action against the company's response.
That's a pretty unfortunate catch-22.
I'm not claiming that every company does this, or that every positive Trustpilot score is manipulated.
But systems like this don't need to remove every negative review to distort the picture.
They only need to make leaving one sufficiently inconvenient.
And apparently, sometimes, a legal threat is enough.
