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They haven't "gone bananas". Removing double opt-in means more subscribers, which means higher revenue for them. Their revenue is based on subscriber counts, no
by dharmon 9y ago
They haven't "gone bananas". Removing double opt-in means more subscribers, which means higher revenue for them. Their revenue is based on subscriber counts, no matter how they were obtained.
I hope everyone else does what I do: any bulk emails I did not subscribe to get marked as spam in gmail. Even a company the size of mailchimp can't cycle and "warm" email servers fast enough if a critical mass of people are tagging unsolicited emails.
- detaro 9y agoI'm curious to see how many of their German customers don't realize they have to explicitly set this now. Here, your competitors can you sue/"fine" you for having single opt-in only.
- chomp 9y agoIt doesn't matter if they believe that it's higher revenue, GDPR requires consent from the data subject [1] to process personal data. An email address is personal data under GDPR. You can't guarantee consent with single opt-in. [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/
- sgarman 9y agoDoes this fall under mailchimps responsibility or the company using their services?
- munchbunny 9y agoThe short answer is both. There's a somewhat longer answer about how MailChimp would need to make the company agree to a separate contract around liability issues, as per GDPR requirements.
- revelation 9y agoEven without GPDR single opt-in is already insufficient in e.g. Germany. If you send a newsletter to some lawyer and can't prove consent you might just get a C&D with statutory damages back.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoIn the short term, probably more revenue. But once they race to the bottom of deliverability rates (like SES, for example), MailChimp will forever have lost it’s major defining feature: emails that actually make it to the inbox.
- stefan69 9y agoI suspect they would use different IP addresses for deliverability depending on a single or double opt-in subscription in order to manage that risk. That would be the sensible think to do at least.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoThat might work against the primitive RBLs like SpamHaus, that rely on DNS-style blacklisting. In the world of carrier-grade email providers, they outsource spam scoring to one (or more) of a selection of about 3 vendors (Symantec, CloudMark come to mind). These systems also score against the sending domain, among a number of other factors. Source: my best friend is a lead engineer at a carrier-grade email provider. And playing whack-a-mole with changing sending domains is ill advised as that will lose the benefit of any whitelisting occurring client side.
- rlpb 9y agoWhat exactly is a carrier-grade email provider?
- CodeWriter23 9y agoISPs/free email at scale (Gmail, etc). Think billions of messages per day. Or where the majority of any audience of an email list receives their email.
- civilian 9y agoYup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, but transactional emails), and AWS SimpleEmailService put us on probation. I got to write a worker task that would consume the queue of "someone marked you as spam" from SES and remove them from our email list.
- austinjp 9y agoForgive the naivety, can you explain a little? From what I understand from this: You sent emails from AWS to subscribers. Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail. You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details. Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?
- BillinghamJ 9y agoYes that’s correct. Email senders are informed when you mark email as spam so they can add you to an unsubscribe list automatically.
- flukus 9y agoSounds like an easy way to verify active email addresses.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- civilian 9y agoIt is! But it's better just to check the SES queue for "email was delivered".
- BillinghamJ 9y agoYeah the SMTP protocol handles verification of mailbox existence already.
- rconti 9y agoAs someone who gets a lot of newsletters from idiots who still think they own the GMail address I've had for 13 years, I'm always afraid marking things as Spam will hurt my experience more than the spammers -- eg, I'm worried it'll lower my account's spam threshold and cause more false positives in my spam folder (which i never, ever check.. and on the rare occasion I do, I occasionally notice I've been 'missing' a newsletter I should have been getting for years). Any comments as to how this works? I've happily used the spam button on many occasions, but I'm always a little gunshy.
- BillinghamJ 9y agoAre there actually any newsletters that you genuinely _want_ to receive? Personally I’d be really pleased if I could tell Gmail to simply ignore anything even remotely newsletter-related, as I would never voluntarily subscribe to one.
- rconti 9y agoYes. Just searching "mailchimp" alone in my gmail inbox, I see stuff from a couple of local wineries of which I'm a member, another winery which I used to buy a gift subscription for my mom, a distillery, a couple of local running groups I sometimes participate in, ... the list goes on.
- natch 9y agoBy observing the behavior of Google’s spam filters (what lands in the spam folder and what doesn’t) you can clearly see that Google is not doing an effective job at applying generally to all users what it learns is deemed spam by some other users. Otherwise it wouldn’t flag its own Google News Alerts emails for example and many other legitimate emails as spam. So your efforts might not be having as great an effect as you think. But it should affect your own mailboxes at least, and maybe that’s enough.
- hgears 9y agoAgreed and worth noting that companies could always elect to use single opt-in with MailChimp lists by running sign up forms via the API.