If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative
If the founder wants to respond they can write a respectful blog post and put it on the fucking homepage. They don't have a right to harangue the author via email.
And why is that, exactly? They do have this “right” and they exercise it.
Or if that's the words that would've been chosen - I would agree to you.
But if you mix those words with extra message, then no. A reply to this new message is warranted.
E.g. if you add a reason and that reason is unreasonable - it's warranted to address that and reply to you. Either do a request without attached strings, or block. Don't write extra conditions/reasoning and then complain that someone doesn't agree with you on those and kept messaging.
Lori's emails are deliberately designed to goad Vlad into replying, just to act indignant when he does.
This is not goading, this is telling someone to fuck off into the sun. If he wants to respond he can respond on his product with a blog post. His audience already dwarfs hers anyways, he Streisand-effect'ed himself because he's clearly got some narcissism issues.
Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing you, after being told to, isn't "combative".
The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.