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MailChimp's Ban on Cryptocurrency Marketing Is Causing Collateral Damage

203 points by exolymph 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kristianc 9y ago
> On the other hand, MailChimp's decision validates the whole decentralization value proposition that drives cryptocurrencies. Sure, there are other email newsletter platforms. Upstart Substack, which is sort of like Patreon for email newsletters, reached out to at least one unhappy former MailChimp customer. And this kind of gets to the nub of it. Centralization brings massive economies of scale, and allows you to free ride off the deliverability of other newsletters that don't come anywhere near talking about potentially fraudulent activity. But you have to play by their rules and you're at the mercy of one day being no longer welcome, even if you've paid them thousands of dollars before. Of course, you're welcome to go off and run your own server / roll your own email protocol / used a 'decentralized' platform or Gab or Voat or whatever, but often a) these things end up being a lot less decentralized than you think, and b) good luck getting anyone to know, care about, or trust you.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Email is especially funny as you can literally send email from any internet connected device, but the default assumption is that emails from new devices are just spam.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    That is far from correct. Any device with DNS records will work just fine.
    - Cenk 9y ago
      As someone who has managed multiple email servers I can assure you that this is not the case. You can do everything "correctly" and still be marked as spam on GMail for no apparent reason.
      - blattimwind 9y ago
        That was clearly your fault, because your IP lives in a bad neighborhood.
        Cenk 9y ago
        It is so much more complicated than that, the issues persisted for completely separated servers even after multiple IP address changes. Running a small mail server and all your email landing in your customers inboxes is something that simply doesn’t happen like it used to.
        simias 9y ago
        I run my own email server (for personal use, not corporate or anything) and maybe I've been lucky with my IPs so far but I don't have a lot of issue getting my emails through. Admittedly for personal email it might be a bit easier because most of my recipients already have me in their address book which probably helps getting through the filters.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        (maybe) according to google, who gives absolutely zero insight into this, or even any indication it is even so. great, might as well go to my local astrologer to consult about deliverability issues.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Just last month I sent an email and gmail silently hid the reply in the spam folder. Marking legitimate email as spam is just the normal functioning of gmail.
    - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
      It will work fine in that it will send the email to the server you want it sent to. That doesn't mean it'll show up in most users inboxes.
    - thefifthsetpin 9y ago
      One of a myriad of reasons that this isn't true: https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/
  - gsich 9y ago
    Not if you do it right.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the default assumption is that emails from new devices are just spam What fraction of e-mails receive from new devices are spam? (Genuine question, if someone has a source or the data.)
  - hippich 9y ago
    correction - if you send thousands emails in short period of time - then new device is considered spam sender. Typically there are no issues sending small amount of emails (like logs from server) unless IP address was already blacklisted after actions of previous IP renter.
- Theodores 9y ago
  No man is an island and neither is any decentralized crypto-'coin'. I think Mailchimp should have done this more tactfully, with a promise to deliver every legit coin newsletter email if the coin is actually in use for something other than speculation, a real use case, adopted and helping the world go round. Where is the blockchain solution for spam, anyways? I have heard about some land registry in Africa that has moved onto the blockchain and I am ready to get my Kodak coins, fully bought in, expecting my Lamborghini to moon soon. But really, I am stumped when it comes to practical application for blockchain coin things. If I owned Mailchimp and was the benevolent dictator chimp in chief then I would freely deliver every legit coin email three times over if it could be proven to be legit rather than barely believable if you are on the Koolaid.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    Except now you're opening yourself up to more problems, by being an editor. How do you determine which ones are "legit" or not? How do you deal with those behind the other emails who will claim up and down, all over Twitter and HN and everywhere that they're totally legit, but the big bad censor won't let them send? And, most importantly, how do you deal with the big email providers disagreeing with you, and lowering your company's reputation score as a result, making it harder for you to do business?
- cortesoft 9y ago
  This is the classic cycle, that happens for 'decentralized' services like email: 1) Design decentralized service, with low barriers to entry 2) Jerks start using the service for bad things that make life miserable for the rest of the users. 3) To combat the spam, some service providers start creating whitelists of which other service providers they will talk to 4) People flock to those service providers, because they are the only ones that aren't flooded with spam. 5) Holdouts end up HAVING to switch to one of those providers because they are the only ones anyone talks to. 6) The service is no longer decentralized in practice I don't know how we get around this problem. These people complaining about not being able to send cryptocurrency emails through mailchimp are complaining about the centralization of the service, but most end users are thinking, "I am really glad I dont have to deal with the spam they are trying to send me." Most people WANT some barriers to entry for services, because without them, spammers will always win.
  - aianus 9y ago
    > I don't know how we get around this problem. Charge $0.001 to deliver an email. Maybe in crypto or some kind of PoW. Legitimate senders won't care about $0.001.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      > Charge $0.001 to deliver an email. Maybe in crypto or some kind of PoW. Legitimate senders won't care about $0.001. So your solution to crypto people poisoning the well is something that will be incredibly inconvenient for everyone but crypto people?
      - CryptoPunk 9y ago
        Spam existed long before cryptocurrency was invented.
    - simias 9y ago
      Funny you'd say that, Bitcoin's PoW algorithm (hashcash) was originally precisely designed for that use case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
I remember when I was trying to advertise my websites in newspapers back in the day and they "didn't allow advertisements for websites." This and all the other crypto bans (Facebook ads, Google ads, etc.) remind me of that- old regimes afraid of new better competition that aims to remove/replace them or make them less relevant. The future will be decentralized.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  how is bitcoin going to replace facebook exactly?
  - unfunco 9y ago
    Where did you read this?
    - boffinism 9y ago
      I believe they're referring to: "the other crypto bans (Facebook ads [...] etc.) remind me of [...] old regimes afraid of [...] competition that aims to remove/replace them"
  - aldoushuxley001 9y ago
    With social networks where the users own their data.
    - duskwuff 9y ago
      Cryptocurrencies are not social networks. Cryptocurrencies will not replace social networks.
      - krrrh 9y ago
        And cryptocurrencies do not prohibit people from buying and selling others people’s data.
  - 9y ago
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
I receive cryptocurrency & ICO spam sent via mailchimp several times a week and usually report it right away. Few weeks ago I called out the CEO of a blockchain company and demanded to know how they got my email since clearly I had no relation with them before. They admitted to have bought a list of addresses from another party where my email was part of the dump. After reporting this I still kept getting spam though. This morning another firm spammed me via MailChimp and despite Mailchimp's claims that they've cracked down on it no statement or apology from them, and I even got the impression that they were looking at me like I'm somehow overly pedantic ... (I was pretty pissed so my reply wasn't as friendly as it could have been): https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/981497156904374272 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/98149715690437427... The basic problem seems to me MailChimp's assumption that people only upload address lists from users they have consent from, when in reality everyone just uploads their LinkedIn address books and hopes not too many will press the "report" button. I am seriously fed up with Mailchimp not taking any actual action against these users after I already told them that I don't consent to receiving any messages about any topic from anybody via their platform. MailChimp should add a feature IMO where if somebody uploads an email address of people opting out that this person will be blacklisted from further using MailChimp.
- ikeboy 9y ago
  Every major email provider and sender already does that. That's table stakes, along with a dozen other things, that's required or else your network will be 99% spam (if it gets any kind of volume, that is). See https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-how-they-work/ https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-ho...
- CPLX 9y ago
  > I am seriously fed up with Mailchimp not taking any actual action against these users after I already told them that I don't consent to receiving any messages about any topic from anybody via their platform. I feel your pain, but it's worth noting that email, by its very design, is intended to be open to receiving unsolicited messages. So frankly, by using email at all you have actually consented to receive unwanted emails from time to time. I think it's unreasonable to expect MailChimp to maintain a ruthless approach to prevent people from doing something that can be done with any email client, sendmail, or any number of tools that use the open protocol of email. Things are bad enough as it is with closed and segmented communications methods on the rise. I'm pretty happy that email exists the way that it does, and MailChimp strikes me as a company that really works hard to strike a balance between the competing needs of being useful for sending mass emails while being mindful of spam.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
ICOs and Cryptocurrencies aren't being singled out so much as categorized by the behavior of the topic/community. MC has a long list of product categories that they have empirically found to have deliverability issues so bad that they harm all of their other users. Escort and dating services Pharmaceutical products Work from home, make money online, and lead generation opportunities Gambling services or products Multi-level marketing Affiliate marketing Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities List brokers or list rental services Selling “Likes” or followers for a social media platform Cryptocurrencies are just the latest. You can read the whole list and more clarifications here (it's very clear and readable for legal documentation): https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >deliverability issues so bad that they harm all of their other users. Why does this harms users who follow the guidelines to show origin/identity (SPF, DKIM, dedicated IP, etc.)? We also use SendGrid for transactional emails and it's the same: some hosts (like Office 365) have told us that they weight all messages coming from sendgrid.net to their users as SPAM because they've seen so many issues there. I pointed out that they should be able to distinguish between spammers and those who, like us, are positively identifiable and have not engaged in SPAM. No avail. Are they being lazy, or am I missing something?
  - jjoske 9y ago
    If the IP addresses get associated with to many spam reports, unsubscribes etc the gmail etc will start to associate these IP addresses as bad, and will be more likely to just block them no matter what the content.
    - gsich 9y ago
      Don't host emails where the IPs used have a high chance that they have been used before. So no AWS/Azure/xyz stuff.
jnnnthnn 9y ago
When I read the article's title, I expected this story to be about other email newsletter platforms being flooded with cryptocurrency mailers who were previously using MailChimp, and how their own deliverability performance was affected. While I assume that what is described in the article might have happened with other verticals, I would be curious to see how this will play out in the larger emailing ecosystem given the current hype & aggressiveness of the commercial practices of at least some of the players in the cryptocurrency field (as attested by others here).
kneath 9y ago
This is an extremely poorly written article. I'm glad most of the comments seem to be ignoring the actual text in it. What collateral damage is being done? It seems to me the opposite of collateral damage is being done: Mailchimp has banned cryptocurrency-related email lists, and those writing cryptocurrency-related emails have lost that ability. Beyond the absurdity of the title, email has always been decentralized. Anyone with a server can send or receive email with whatever technology stack they so wish. Of course, because there is no trust framework, there's no guarantee that your email will get delivered… Which is why Mailchimp validated the opposite of the article's conclusion: there is lots of value in centralizing the management of email. They can act as a trusted authority to negotiate with various email hosts and guarantee(-ish) to customers that the emails will get delivered.
- firasd 9y ago
  > What collateral damage is being done? The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell anything) you're still getting shut down.
  - kneath 9y ago
    All of the examples in the article (zeitgeist-style newsletters) fall very clearly under a marketing umbrella by my judgement. They're the TV Guides of cryptocurrency. Maybe they don't (all) have affiliate links, but advertising is far beyond that line in 2018. If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing.
    - zodiac 9y ago
      > If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing. I think this is way too broad and leads to absurd conclusions. For instance there's an MIT research group whose mailing list I subscribe to (not mailchimp) and which would fall under marketing by your criteria. Papers with specific cryptocurrency names occasionally appear in top CS conferences.
Animats 9y ago
Mailchimp is a spamming service. They pretend not to be, but that's what they really do. If Mailchimp was legit, they wouldn't have to work so hard to conceal where they're sending from.
- CookieMon 9y ago
  Not the only shady thing, by using Firefox with a webmail interface, all Mailchimp's tracking is automatically removed, which means most businesses these days send me their promotional announcements as a blank email. I don't know who's to blame - whether Mailchimp has tracking up the wazoo enabled by default and people need to be knowledgeable to turn it off, or if businesses just can't help themselves when offered analytic features, but it's pretty crazy how Mailchimp hosts enough of the email's content in cross-site tracking domains that sanitizing them leaves the mailouts empty. When an advertising push looks like this you know they're using Mailchimp: https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png That "view this email in your browser" link even brings up a similarly blank webpage! That link is already tracked, by clicking on it they already know I've looked at the email and care enough to want to see it properly, but the web version is still woven whole out of cross-site tracking shenanigans that it's filtered out (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking...).
RobLach 9y ago
What are they right about? E-mail is already decentralized. Anyone can send and receive an e-mail with only having network access as a barrier, and you only need a typical modern computer to send millions of them. Mailchimp's value proposition is that by becoming an authority over a chunk of distribution using their brand, anything they send carries a badge of trust since they promise it isn't malicious. Their e-mail templates are a nice bonus, but I don't think that's the only reason some people use them. That mailchimp origin server is a keycard through a bunch of gatekeepers propped up as sentries against spam. In essence e-mail is totally decentralized and trust is exchanged amongst members of ad-hoc federation of parties with a vested interest of having non-spam email get through the internet on both receiving and sending ends. Is there a way a blockchain would make this market-based emergent system more efficient?
patio11 9y ago
Bingo Card Creator's MailChimp account got shut down once for gambling content. I sent in a request to support with an explanation that there was no gambling involved; the matter was resolved within a business day. Running an email service provider is a rough business: a) Emails hitting inboxes are basically indistinguishable from cash at scale, and therefore you have all the fraud problems of a payments business but without a lot of the built-in fraud resolution systems b) There exists an oligopoly of inbox providers who have a Nuke Your Business From Orbit button available to them, and that button can and will be pushed by a cron job if you do not keep your customers squeaky clean c) The customer population is frequently low-sophistication, like the owners of flower shops or virtually anyone in the cryptocurrency economy (my apologies to professional journalists like, err, Two Bit Idiot) d) Per-account values are, at the low end, really, really low by the standards of B2B SaaS, and as a result your customer service has to get operated in a very scalable fashion, and that implies some tradeoffs where not everybody is going to be happy with it 100% of the time.
- robbiemitchell 9y ago
  Not enough people understand (b). Email providers have firm policies (i.e., robots) because they themselves are at the mercy of inbox provider robots.
  - davedx 9y ago
    Yeah, having worked on a medium scale web service that sent email before the days of managed email list SaaS like MailChimp... I don't miss those days.
- igammarays 9y ago
  What stops a business owner from abstracting away the underlying email provider and sending domain, so that their email campaigns can be up and running again in minutes if Mailchimp bans them? Thankfully there are several reputable email service providers...and most companies have more than one top-level domain associated with their name...so a legitimate business should be able to keep their email program running without exposing their neck to the mercy of a single bot (atleast until the issue is resolved by support). Real spammers would quickly get banned from all major providers (hopefully), and the content of the spam email would get machine-learned.
skookumchuck 9y ago
Twitter is a better way to reach customers, because they specifically "opt-in" by following a business. No complaints about spamming people.
- EduardoBautista 9y ago
  Mail chimp campaigns are also opt in for the most part.
donmatito 9y ago
That's a problem earn.com could have solved, but unfortunately only ICO promoters ended up using the platform, I think
- corobo 9y ago
  Does anyone know if earn.com had another name prior to around November 2017? I figured it was just spam similar to what this thread refers to because I only ever get crypto-related emails from it. If it wasn't for the more-premium-than-most domain I'd have already auto-spammed it Edit: Naturally seconds after asking I find an email from Angel List saying 21.co rebranded to earn.com. As it turns out I'd been added or at some point had added myself to an "Airdrop" list, which is a list of people interested in cryptocoins. Removed myself from that and unchecked "Receive emails for tasks below your contact price?" should finally stop getting emails about dodgy new cryptocoins. Successful rubber duck debugging

203 points by exolymph 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

> On the other hand, MailChimp's decision validates the whole decentralization value proposition that drives cryptocurrencies. Sure, there are other email newsletter platforms. Upstart Substack, which is sort of like Patreon for email newsletters, reached out to at least one unhappy former MailChimp customer. And this kind of gets to the nub of it. Centralization brings massive economies of scale, and allows you to free ride off the deliverability of other newsletters that don't come anywhere near talking about potentially fraudulent activity. But you have to play by their rules and you're at the mercy of one day being no longer welcome, even if you've paid them thousands of dollars before. Of course, you're welcome to go off and run your own server / roll your own email protocol / used a 'decentralized' platform or Gab or Voat or whatever, but often a) these things end up being a lot less decentralized than you think, and b) good luck getting anyone to know, care about, or trust you.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Email is especially funny as you can literally send email from any internet connected device, but the default assumption is that emails from new devices are just spam.
- user5994461 9y ago
  That is far from correct. Any device with DNS records will work just fine.
  - Cenk 9y ago
    As someone who has managed multiple email servers I can assure you that this is not the case. You can do everything "correctly" and still be marked as spam on GMail for no apparent reason.
    - blattimwind 9y ago
      That was clearly your fault, because your IP lives in a bad neighborhood.
      - Cenk 9y ago
        It is so much more complicated than that, the issues persisted for completely separated servers even after multiple IP address changes. Running a small mail server and all your email landing in your customers inboxes is something that simply doesn’t happen like it used to.
        simias 9y ago
        I run my own email server (for personal use, not corporate or anything) and maybe I've been lucky with my IPs so far but I don't have a lot of issue getting my emails through. Admittedly for personal email it might be a bit easier because most of my recipients already have me in their address book which probably helps getting through the filters.
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        (maybe) according to google, who gives absolutely zero insight into this, or even any indication it is even so. great, might as well go to my local astrologer to consult about deliverability issues.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Just last month I sent an email and gmail silently hid the reply in the spam folder. Marking legitimate email as spam is just the normal functioning of gmail.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    It will work fine in that it will send the email to the server you want it sent to. That doesn't mean it'll show up in most users inboxes.
  - thefifthsetpin 9y ago
    One of a myriad of reasons that this isn't true: https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/
- gsich 9y ago
  Not if you do it right.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > the default assumption is that emails from new devices are just spam What fraction of e-mails receive from new devices are spam? (Genuine question, if someone has a source or the data.)
- hippich 9y ago
  correction - if you send thousands emails in short period of time - then new device is considered spam sender. Typically there are no issues sending small amount of emails (like logs from server) unless IP address was already blacklisted after actions of previous IP renter.
Theodores 9y ago
No man is an island and neither is any decentralized crypto-'coin'. I think Mailchimp should have done this more tactfully, with a promise to deliver every legit coin newsletter email if the coin is actually in use for something other than speculation, a real use case, adopted and helping the world go round. Where is the blockchain solution for spam, anyways? I have heard about some land registry in Africa that has moved onto the blockchain and I am ready to get my Kodak coins, fully bought in, expecting my Lamborghini to moon soon. But really, I am stumped when it comes to practical application for blockchain coin things. If I owned Mailchimp and was the benevolent dictator chimp in chief then I would freely deliver every legit coin email three times over if it could be proven to be legit rather than barely believable if you are on the Koolaid.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Except now you're opening yourself up to more problems, by being an editor. How do you determine which ones are "legit" or not? How do you deal with those behind the other emails who will claim up and down, all over Twitter and HN and everywhere that they're totally legit, but the big bad censor won't let them send? And, most importantly, how do you deal with the big email providers disagreeing with you, and lowering your company's reputation score as a result, making it harder for you to do business?
cortesoft 9y ago
This is the classic cycle, that happens for 'decentralized' services like email: 1) Design decentralized service, with low barriers to entry 2) Jerks start using the service for bad things that make life miserable for the rest of the users. 3) To combat the spam, some service providers start creating whitelists of which other service providers they will talk to 4) People flock to those service providers, because they are the only ones that aren't flooded with spam. 5) Holdouts end up HAVING to switch to one of those providers because they are the only ones anyone talks to. 6) The service is no longer decentralized in practice I don't know how we get around this problem. These people complaining about not being able to send cryptocurrency emails through mailchimp are complaining about the centralization of the service, but most end users are thinking, "I am really glad I dont have to deal with the spam they are trying to send me." Most people WANT some barriers to entry for services, because without them, spammers will always win.
- aianus 9y ago
  > I don't know how we get around this problem. Charge $0.001 to deliver an email. Maybe in crypto or some kind of PoW. Legitimate senders won't care about $0.001.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    > Charge $0.001 to deliver an email. Maybe in crypto or some kind of PoW. Legitimate senders won't care about $0.001. So your solution to crypto people poisoning the well is something that will be incredibly inconvenient for everyone but crypto people?
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      Spam existed long before cryptocurrency was invented.
  - simias 9y ago
    Funny you'd say that, Bitcoin's PoW algorithm (hashcash) was originally precisely designed for that use case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

I remember when I was trying to advertise my websites in newspapers back in the day and they "didn't allow advertisements for websites." This and all the other crypto bans (Facebook ads, Google ads, etc.) remind me of that- old regimes afraid of new better competition that aims to remove/replace them or make them less relevant. The future will be decentralized.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago
how is bitcoin going to replace facebook exactly?
- unfunco 9y ago
  Where did you read this?
  - boffinism 9y ago
    I believe they're referring to: "the other crypto bans (Facebook ads [...] etc.) remind me of [...] old regimes afraid of [...] competition that aims to remove/replace them"
- aldoushuxley001 9y ago
  With social networks where the users own their data.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies are not social networks. Cryptocurrencies will not replace social networks.
    - krrrh 9y ago
      And cryptocurrencies do not prohibit people from buying and selling others people’s data.
- 9y ago

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

I receive cryptocurrency & ICO spam sent via mailchimp several times a week and usually report it right away. Few weeks ago I called out the CEO of a blockchain company and demanded to know how they got my email since clearly I had no relation with them before. They admitted to have bought a list of addresses from another party where my email was part of the dump. After reporting this I still kept getting spam though. This morning another firm spammed me via MailChimp and despite Mailchimp's claims that they've cracked down on it no statement or apology from them, and I even got the impression that they were looking at me like I'm somehow overly pedantic ... (I was pretty pissed so my reply wasn't as friendly as it could have been): https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/981497156904374272 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/98149715690437427... The basic problem seems to me MailChimp's assumption that people only upload address lists from users they have consent from, when in reality everyone just uploads their LinkedIn address books and hopes not too many will press the "report" button. I am seriously fed up with Mailchimp not taking any actual action against these users after I already told them that I don't consent to receiving any messages about any topic from anybody via their platform. MailChimp should add a feature IMO where if somebody uploads an email address of people opting out that this person will be blacklisted from further using MailChimp.

ikeboy 9y ago
Every major email provider and sender already does that. That's table stakes, along with a dozen other things, that's required or else your network will be 99% spam (if it gets any kind of volume, that is). See https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-how-they-work/ https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-ho...
CPLX 9y ago
> I am seriously fed up with Mailchimp not taking any actual action against these users after I already told them that I don't consent to receiving any messages about any topic from anybody via their platform. I feel your pain, but it's worth noting that email, by its very design, is intended to be open to receiving unsolicited messages. So frankly, by using email at all you have actually consented to receive unwanted emails from time to time. I think it's unreasonable to expect MailChimp to maintain a ruthless approach to prevent people from doing something that can be done with any email client, sendmail, or any number of tools that use the open protocol of email. Things are bad enough as it is with closed and segmented communications methods on the rise. I'm pretty happy that email exists the way that it does, and MailChimp strikes me as a company that really works hard to strike a balance between the competing needs of being useful for sending mass emails while being mindful of spam.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

ICOs and Cryptocurrencies aren't being singled out so much as categorized by the behavior of the topic/community. MC has a long list of product categories that they have empirically found to have deliverability issues so bad that they harm all of their other users. Escort and dating services Pharmaceutical products Work from home, make money online, and lead generation opportunities Gambling services or products Multi-level marketing Affiliate marketing Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities List brokers or list rental services Selling “Likes” or followers for a social media platform Cryptocurrencies are just the latest. You can read the whole list and more clarifications here (it's very clear and readable for legal documentation): https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/

unclebucknasty 9y ago
>deliverability issues so bad that they harm all of their other users. Why does this harms users who follow the guidelines to show origin/identity (SPF, DKIM, dedicated IP, etc.)? We also use SendGrid for transactional emails and it's the same: some hosts (like Office 365) have told us that they weight all messages coming from sendgrid.net to their users as SPAM because they've seen so many issues there. I pointed out that they should be able to distinguish between spammers and those who, like us, are positively identifiable and have not engaged in SPAM. No avail. Are they being lazy, or am I missing something?
- jjoske 9y ago
  If the IP addresses get associated with to many spam reports, unsubscribes etc the gmail etc will start to associate these IP addresses as bad, and will be more likely to just block them no matter what the content.
  - gsich 9y ago
    Don't host emails where the IPs used have a high chance that they have been used before. So no AWS/Azure/xyz stuff.

jnnnthnn 9y ago

When I read the article's title, I expected this story to be about other email newsletter platforms being flooded with cryptocurrency mailers who were previously using MailChimp, and how their own deliverability performance was affected. While I assume that what is described in the article might have happened with other verticals, I would be curious to see how this will play out in the larger emailing ecosystem given the current hype & aggressiveness of the commercial practices of at least some of the players in the cryptocurrency field (as attested by others here).

kneath 9y ago

This is an extremely poorly written article. I'm glad most of the comments seem to be ignoring the actual text in it. What collateral damage is being done? It seems to me the opposite of collateral damage is being done: Mailchimp has banned cryptocurrency-related email lists, and those writing cryptocurrency-related emails have lost that ability. Beyond the absurdity of the title, email has always been decentralized. Anyone with a server can send or receive email with whatever technology stack they so wish. Of course, because there is no trust framework, there's no guarantee that your email will get delivered… Which is why Mailchimp validated the opposite of the article's conclusion: there is lots of value in centralizing the management of email. They can act as a trusted authority to negotiate with various email hosts and guarantee(-ish) to customers that the emails will get delivered.

firasd 9y ago
> What collateral damage is being done? The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell anything) you're still getting shut down.
- kneath 9y ago
  All of the examples in the article (zeitgeist-style newsletters) fall very clearly under a marketing umbrella by my judgement. They're the TV Guides of cryptocurrency. Maybe they don't (all) have affiliate links, but advertising is far beyond that line in 2018. If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing.
  - zodiac 9y ago
    > If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing. I think this is way too broad and leads to absurd conclusions. For instance there's an MIT research group whose mailing list I subscribe to (not mailchimp) and which would fall under marketing by your criteria. Papers with specific cryptocurrency names occasionally appear in top CS conferences.

Animats 9y ago

Mailchimp is a spamming service. They pretend not to be, but that's what they really do. If Mailchimp was legit, they wouldn't have to work so hard to conceal where they're sending from.

CookieMon 9y ago
Not the only shady thing, by using Firefox with a webmail interface, all Mailchimp's tracking is automatically removed, which means most businesses these days send me their promotional announcements as a blank email. I don't know who's to blame - whether Mailchimp has tracking up the wazoo enabled by default and people need to be knowledgeable to turn it off, or if businesses just can't help themselves when offered analytic features, but it's pretty crazy how Mailchimp hosts enough of the email's content in cross-site tracking domains that sanitizing them leaves the mailouts empty. When an advertising push looks like this you know they're using Mailchimp: https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png That "view this email in your browser" link even brings up a similarly blank webpage! That link is already tracked, by clicking on it they already know I've looked at the email and care enough to want to see it properly, but the web version is still woven whole out of cross-site tracking shenanigans that it's filtered out (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking...).

RobLach 9y ago

What are they right about? E-mail is already decentralized. Anyone can send and receive an e-mail with only having network access as a barrier, and you only need a typical modern computer to send millions of them. Mailchimp's value proposition is that by becoming an authority over a chunk of distribution using their brand, anything they send carries a badge of trust since they promise it isn't malicious. Their e-mail templates are a nice bonus, but I don't think that's the only reason some people use them. That mailchimp origin server is a keycard through a bunch of gatekeepers propped up as sentries against spam. In essence e-mail is totally decentralized and trust is exchanged amongst members of ad-hoc federation of parties with a vested interest of having non-spam email get through the internet on both receiving and sending ends. Is there a way a blockchain would make this market-based emergent system more efficient?

patio11 9y ago

Bingo Card Creator's MailChimp account got shut down once for gambling content. I sent in a request to support with an explanation that there was no gambling involved; the matter was resolved within a business day. Running an email service provider is a rough business: a) Emails hitting inboxes are basically indistinguishable from cash at scale, and therefore you have all the fraud problems of a payments business but without a lot of the built-in fraud resolution systems b) There exists an oligopoly of inbox providers who have a Nuke Your Business From Orbit button available to them, and that button can and will be pushed by a cron job if you do not keep your customers squeaky clean c) The customer population is frequently low-sophistication, like the owners of flower shops or virtually anyone in the cryptocurrency economy (my apologies to professional journalists like, err, Two Bit Idiot) d) Per-account values are, at the low end, really, really low by the standards of B2B SaaS, and as a result your customer service has to get operated in a very scalable fashion, and that implies some tradeoffs where not everybody is going to be happy with it 100% of the time.

robbiemitchell 9y ago
Not enough people understand (b). Email providers have firm policies (i.e., robots) because they themselves are at the mercy of inbox provider robots.
- davedx 9y ago
  Yeah, having worked on a medium scale web service that sent email before the days of managed email list SaaS like MailChimp... I don't miss those days.
igammarays 9y ago
What stops a business owner from abstracting away the underlying email provider and sending domain, so that their email campaigns can be up and running again in minutes if Mailchimp bans them? Thankfully there are several reputable email service providers...and most companies have more than one top-level domain associated with their name...so a legitimate business should be able to keep their email program running without exposing their neck to the mercy of a single bot (atleast until the issue is resolved by support). Real spammers would quickly get banned from all major providers (hopefully), and the content of the spam email would get machine-learned.

skookumchuck 9y ago

Twitter is a better way to reach customers, because they specifically "opt-in" by following a business. No complaints about spamming people.

EduardoBautista 9y ago
Mail chimp campaigns are also opt in for the most part.

donmatito 9y ago

That's a problem earn.com could have solved, but unfortunately only ICO promoters ended up using the platform, I think

corobo 9y ago
Does anyone know if earn.com had another name prior to around November 2017? I figured it was just spam similar to what this thread refers to because I only ever get crypto-related emails from it. If it wasn't for the more-premium-than-most domain I'd have already auto-spammed it Edit: Naturally seconds after asking I find an email from Angel List saying 21.co rebranded to earn.com. As it turns out I'd been added or at some point had added myself to an "Airdrop" list, which is a list of people interested in cryptocoins. Removed myself from that and unchecked "Receive emails for tasks below your contact price?" should finally stop getting emails about dodgy new cryptocoins. Successful rubber duck debugging