3 ms·
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 in
by 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 agoNot 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 agoYeah, 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 agoWhat 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.
- wikwocket 9y agoNothing really prevents this; a company I work with does something similar, and as long as you engineer your use of the platforms to be flexible and not rely on platform-specific features (for example MailChimp and SendGrid use slightly different templating approaches, and support different amounts of logic in the templates), it's doable. This is the same idea as making your system work across availability zones/datacenters/cloud providers. At a certain scale it becomes a good idea.