The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren'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.
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".