magnetic

My young daughter got 2 Amazon Gift cards for her birthday, but they look like they've been tampered with. I would like to check whether they are valid or not without having to go through the redeeming process: I want to avoid being at the mercy of a fraud detection algorithm that may lock me out of my account. There was a HN story not too long ago about someone who got locked out of their iCloud account for similar reasons, and the risk doesn't seem to be worth it to me. Surely, I can't be the only one with this problem. How do people do this "safely"?

I unsubscribed from a marketing email list over a month ago. This is from a large pharmacy chain in the US that I suspect I got enrolled into during a medication purchase.

I keep receiving marketing emails from them, and when I click "unsubscribe", the backend keeps telling me "There are no email subscriptions associated with *@*". That means it did take into account my unsubscribe request the first time around, as it doesn't find me in the DB.

So their DB doesn't have me in there, but I still get emails.

I understand the challenges of distributed systems, eventual consistency, etc... and so it appears the entity sending the email is using an "old" DB with my email address in it, that isn't sync'd yet with my removal update, but after waiting for over a month, I'm beginning to think this will never stop.

How would you deal with that?

I've gone through a "successful" email unsubscribe process quite a few times with some companies, only to find out that nothing really happened (keep receiving weekly/monthly spam).

These aren't shady companies either: they are large legit entities in the US.

I've given them the benefit of the doubt a few times, thinking that perhaps a bug failed to write my update to their subscription database, but after a handful of tries with the same outcome, I realized it is not isolated.

Of course I can add an email filter, but that will not take care of the root cause that most likely affects everyone else too, whether it's a deliberate attempt at denying my request to unsubscribe or simply a bug that nobody has a way to report.

What is a proper gentle nudge to say "hey, your unsubscribe system is broken, please fix it"?

There is usually no contact info available to have this kind of "out of band" communication.