12mo ago

Tax Act's Unsubscribe Has Been Broken for Months

Tax Act sends multiple promotional emails daily. Attempting to unsubscribe does nothing, and I've tried for months.

Finally, today, I opened the browser dev console and see that it's throwing JS errors when you attempt to save. I'm 100% sure this is a feature and not a bug. The only other way they will remove you is by writing a physical letter and mailing it out to them.

Moral of the story: Do not use TaxAct. Fuck Tax Act.

22 comments

Time to start marking them as spam and hurting their sender reputation.
- I run my own email, so I'm basically reporting it to myself lol (though Spam Assassin does train from the spam folder).
  I did finally just setup a filter rule to send those directly to spam after checking back to see that the actual, tax-filing emails come from a different address.
  But yeah, if you get those to gmail or somehwere, definitely report them as spam.
Sounds like fraud to me
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq
Moral of the story: Do not use TaxAct. Fuck Tax Act.
I got a letter about a class action lawsuit against them for giving my data to Facebook and Google, so yes I agree.
The only thing I miss about my time as president of an ISP was being able to DOS companies like this without repercussions. I'd feign ignorance when the tech support calls would eventually escalate to me because an IT VP wanted us to stop because their email server was crashing.
- That's so BOFH, and I love it.
To use an "unsubscribe" function is to do the sender a courtesy -- it behooves them to have it work properly because it exists for their own benefit. But hey, if they'd rather you just mark them as spam and fuck over their reputation instead, who are you to argue?
Find their sales email and set up an auto forward.
- I did that once with another company. The result was that I got an abuse complaint from them and my domain got on a spam blacklist for a while.
  Since then, for such mails it’s only abuse reports and sinkhole their domain if possible.
  
  I haven't been put on an rbl.
https://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml
I’ve been using them to report spammers (including companies who can’t be bothered to fix their mailing list unsubscription mechanisms). It works by parsing mail headers, identifying the origin of the email and submitting email abuse reports to the operators of the relays that processed the unwanted email.
- Oh, nice. Will check that out.
  I run my own mail server, and I can train on identified spam, but I'm not large or important enough to really have my spam reports honored by any major players/filters.
  That sounds like it may fill that gap. thanks!
"Tax Act" sounds suspiciously similar to "Cat Facts".
Tax Act is not a class act.
Tax act used to be good. TLDR, tried to sell to HR Block, then appointed Intuit(TurboTax) Ex CEO as president. Scalping of value and enshittification continued:
"...In October 2010, H&R Block said it would pay $287.5 million in cash to acquire the parent firm of TaxAct.[3] In May 2011 the U.S. Department of Justice attempted to stop the acquisition in an antitrust lawsuit.[4][5] In November 2011, a federal judge sided with the Justice Department, and both companies mutually terminated the contract.[6][7]
In January 2012, 2nd Story Software was sold to Seattle-based Blucora (formerly Infospace, Inc.) for more than $287 million.[8][9][10] In 2013, the name was officially changed to TaxAct Holdings, Inc. Subsequently, in October of the same year, TaxAct acquired Balance Financial, the company that specializes in personal finance tools and services.[11]
In 2018, former Intuit executive Curtis Campbell was appointed as the President of the company.[12]
In November 2022, private equity firm Cinven agreed to acquire TaxAct for about $720 million. Cinven announced it would combine..."
- In November 2022, private equity firm....
  Ah, there it is. Was trying to pinpoint the year it went to crap, and that sounds about right. I don't remember being annoyed with it until very recently, so that checks out.
  
  They used to be competitive and I used them 10+ years ago then suddenly their rates were crazy and I've been using freetaxusa ever since. ~$15 for state and federal
- It is owned by Intuit which is scummy company
  
  No it's not owned by them. Yes Intuit are scummy.
https://simplelogin.io/ There are other services like this too. Create a separate email address for every service and forward it to your real one. If one of them won’t stop sending emails you don’t want, just turn off that email address.
Faulty unsubscribe link will make me instantly black-hole your domain. Less hassle that way. Did the same to Adobe when I got ad mails from them for some reason that also had a broken unsubscribe link.
- Also any prompt to "login" and "manage email settings" after clicking the unsub link

22 comments