8 ms·

Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about i

by sfifs 8y ago

Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - not exactly exemplary practice for handling anything "mission-critial".

martin-adams 8y ago
If the chat option is for paid users, I'm not sure that would have been useful if the account was deleted.
- sfifs 8y ago
  Fair point. Though I suspect many more warning signs would have come up given billing is involved.
gizmo 8y ago
It's unprofessional to write a blog post about your account getting deleted without notice? Mailchimp is a business, and the relationship between a person and a business is not friendship. When they shut down an account without notice blogging about it (in a non-accusatory manner no less) is completely reasonable. This isn't a smear job. Talking in public about the manner in which businesses conduct themselves is a good thing. It benefits businesses with good customer service and hurts those with bad service. More transparency is good for consumers and for businesses alike.
acd10j 8y ago
Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.
- sfifs 8y ago
  Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle... Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like giving resolution a reasonable shot. If it were my business, I'd fire this poster as a client.
  - gizmo 8y ago
    > Shit happens from time to time in business This the kind of apologetics I can't stand. These things happen because businesses knowingly take actions that negatively affect a small percentage of their user base, but they just don't care if the percentage is small enough. Software businesses enjoy extremely high gross margins, which means they can afford first-rate customer service. "Bad things happen" isn't an excuse.
  - foxX 8y ago
    Oh my god, so salty! But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity. This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels. If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
abc-xyz 8y ago
Assuming the author is truthful, then I'd say Mailchimps actions are a lot more questionable. Shutting the account down without a warning? Making it impossible for him to see his mailing list even if the ban was deserved? I don't know about you but I'd never want to use a mailing service if I knew that I at any time could lose access to the mailing list I had spent months/years building up..
- vezycash 8y ago
  My own experience with mailchimp was very brief. Created an account, verified my email address. Then i sent a test email to the same email I verified my MC account with. Immediately, MC disabled my account's ability to send emails. My appeal to support was ignored and eventually, the account was deleted - banned.
- dan_tyler 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Any business who respects the customer would know that this type of stuff is totally unacceptable, and the list is a huge money maker for anyone. I got really pissed with MailChimp and their support for exactly these reasons and decided to move to SendX. That's it, haven't looked back ever since and I don't think I ever will unless something major goes wrong.
lisper 8y ago
OP here. I waited several hours between contacting MC and posting the blog entry. This was (and still is) a time-sensitive mission-critical issue. I have customers I cannot contact about a potential security flaw in my product. Happily, I need to contact them to tell them that my product is NOT affected, but it could easily have been otherwise, and in the future it might be otherwise. This is an existential threat to my customers and my business. Damn right I'm not going to wait around. FWIW, MC did respond, saying essentially that there is nothing they are willing to do, and that I need to create a new account. I have written them back asking if I will be able to access my old mailing list from my new account (obviously the answer to that is going to be "no" but I want to get it on the record). They have not responded.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  it almost sounds like they don't want your customers to know your product is not affected. hypothetically speaking, could one of your clients make a possibly bad hasty security move by being under the immpression your product is vulnerable?
  - lisper 8y ago
    I would give you very long odds that no one at MC had a clue who I was before this story showed up on the front page of HN. My mailing list is very small (it's a very niche product) and I hardly use the MC account (which was the problem to begin with). I'm sure I just got caught in their process. I'm equally sure that their process was designed to thwart abuse, which is surely a major problem for them. (In fact, it surely the major problem for them!) But it just seems to me that they just didn't think it through. This whole unfortunate situation could have been avoided with a single automated email drawing my attention to the fact that my account was about to be closed for inactivity.
- CodeWriter23 8y ago
  It sounds like you afforded more notice to MailChimp than they did for you.
  - 8y ago
raverbashing 8y ago
So, besides blaming the victim your point is?
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism So basically, if that person was a plumber, and a bath they installed worked perfectly, you'd now think maybe that was a fluke, because their professionality is "borderline questionable" (is that like borderline borderline, or questionably questionable?) Yet you say you "don't scream publicly sullying reputations" -- so they're not professional, and now they're "screaming", both of which are things you are creating, while they're stating the cold facts, and they just don't happen to be flattering. That you can be "professional" without being good, at all, just shows how meaningless that word is.

by sfifs 8y ago

martin-adams 8y ago

If the chat option is for paid users, I'm not sure that would have been useful if the account was deleted.

sfifs 8y ago
Fair point. Though I suspect many more warning signs would have come up given billing is involved.

gizmo 8y ago

It's unprofessional to write a blog post about your account getting deleted without notice? Mailchimp is a business, and the relationship between a person and a business is not friendship. When they shut down an account without notice blogging about it (in a non-accusatory manner no less) is completely reasonable. This isn't a smear job. Talking in public about the manner in which businesses conduct themselves is a good thing. It benefits businesses with good customer service and hurts those with bad service. More transparency is good for consumers and for businesses alike.

acd10j 8y ago

Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.

sfifs 8y ago
Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle... Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like giving resolution a reasonable shot. If it were my business, I'd fire this poster as a client.
- gizmo 8y ago
  > Shit happens from time to time in business This the kind of apologetics I can't stand. These things happen because businesses knowingly take actions that negatively affect a small percentage of their user base, but they just don't care if the percentage is small enough. Software businesses enjoy extremely high gross margins, which means they can afford first-rate customer service. "Bad things happen" isn't an excuse.
- foxX 8y ago
  Oh my god, so salty! But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity. This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels. If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.

abc-xyz 8y ago

Assuming the author is truthful, then I'd say Mailchimps actions are a lot more questionable. Shutting the account down without a warning? Making it impossible for him to see his mailing list even if the ban was deserved? I don't know about you but I'd never want to use a mailing service if I knew that I at any time could lose access to the mailing list I had spent months/years building up..

vezycash 8y ago
My own experience with mailchimp was very brief. Created an account, verified my email address. Then i sent a test email to the same email I verified my MC account with. Immediately, MC disabled my account's ability to send emails. My appeal to support was ignored and eventually, the account was deleted - banned.
dan_tyler 8y ago
Couldn't agree more. Any business who respects the customer would know that this type of stuff is totally unacceptable, and the list is a huge money maker for anyone. I got really pissed with MailChimp and their support for exactly these reasons and decided to move to SendX. That's it, haven't looked back ever since and I don't think I ever will unless something major goes wrong.

lisper 8y ago

OP here. I waited several hours between contacting MC and posting the blog entry. This was (and still is) a time-sensitive mission-critical issue. I have customers I cannot contact about a potential security flaw in my product. Happily, I need to contact them to tell them that my product is NOT affected, but it could easily have been otherwise, and in the future it might be otherwise. This is an existential threat to my customers and my business. Damn right I'm not going to wait around. FWIW, MC did respond, saying essentially that there is nothing they are willing to do, and that I need to create a new account. I have written them back asking if I will be able to access my old mailing list from my new account (obviously the answer to that is going to be "no" but I want to get it on the record). They have not responded.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
it almost sounds like they don't want your customers to know your product is not affected. hypothetically speaking, could one of your clients make a possibly bad hasty security move by being under the immpression your product is vulnerable?
- lisper 8y ago
  I would give you very long odds that no one at MC had a clue who I was before this story showed up on the front page of HN. My mailing list is very small (it's a very niche product) and I hardly use the MC account (which was the problem to begin with). I'm sure I just got caught in their process. I'm equally sure that their process was designed to thwart abuse, which is surely a major problem for them. (In fact, it surely the major problem for them!) But it just seems to me that they just didn't think it through. This whole unfortunate situation could have been avoided with a single automated email drawing my attention to the fact that my account was about to be closed for inactivity.
CodeWriter23 8y ago
It sounds like you afforded more notice to MailChimp than they did for you.
- 8y ago

raverbashing 8y ago

So, besides blaming the victim your point is?

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism So basically, if that person was a plumber, and a bath they installed worked perfectly, you'd now think maybe that was a fluke, because their professionality is "borderline questionable" (is that like borderline borderline, or questionably questionable?) Yet you say you "don't scream publicly sullying reputations" -- so they're not professional, and now they're "screaming", both of which are things you are creating, while they're stating the cold facts, and they just don't happen to be flattering. That you can be "professional" without being good, at all, just shows how meaningless that word is.