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To people mentioning public shaming. I had a mailing list with them removed with all contacts lost and account banned without even notifying me. Customer suppor

To people mentioning public shaming. I had a mailing list with them removed with all contacts lost and account banned without even notifying me. Customer support indeed responded, but with something like your account was banned because you are involved into cryptocurrencies (i had hashcash.io - no selling or buying of crypto is even close) and we completely wiped all your data. Only after a hint about possible public shaming, someone sent me data dump with all the emails and names. So they lied in the first response (all data is wiped and unrecoverable) and only responded to a threat. Since then I am using Mautic and own SMTP server.

abc-xyz 8y ago
I hope everyone already using or considering using MailChimp reads this. Denying access to your mailing list even if you violated their terms is insane. Banning accounts with no warning is already bad enough - ideally they'd just disable your ability to send emails until the issue was resolved, but at least I can accept that.. but to steal people's mailing list in the process? What the fuck.
- lisper 8y ago
  OP here. To be clear, I did not violate their TOS. And deactivating an account for inactivity is not entirely unreasonable, especially a free account. What is unreasonable IMHO, and the reason I want to bring this to people's attention, is deactivating an account without a warning, without even a notification, and with no way to recover. That is a ticking time bomb that I was simply unaware of. I never even imagined that a company as successful and popular as MC could have such an inane policy. Obviously, if I had know, I would have done things differently. All I can do now is sound the alarm so that other people don't step on this land mine. (And maybe public shaming will convince MC to give me my mailing list back, but I'm not counting on it.) P.S. One of the problems here is that "inactivity" is ambiguous in this case. I had not logged in to my account in a long time, but people were signing up for my list. I assumed that would count as "activity".
  - RhodesianHunter 8y ago
    Two landmines: 1. The MC one 2. Relying on any free service as an important part of your business. The adage "you get what you pay for" really does tend to hold true.
    - lisper 8y ago
      The irony is that if MC had sent me an email saying that I needed to upgrade to a paid account in order to keep it active, I would have sent them a check without hesitation. That's one of the frustrating things about this. MC has turned this into a lose-lose when it really didn't have to be.
    - dkonofalski 8y ago
      That's the big takeaway here, in my opinion. Regardless of the fault with MailChimp (and I do think they're at fault here), you should never rely on a free service if it's mission critical to your business and there should never be a single point of failure like this. If this really was as critical as OP claims it is, then they should have taken more care to ensure that this wasn't even possible.
- megous 8y ago
  For data you care about, you have backups. It's better than being angry later, regardless of whether you're angry at some company or at yourself (for not having backups). Backups also make your life longer, because of reduced stress. Otoh, you spend some of that extra time making backups, but it's still a win win, I guess. :D
  - jeromegv 8y ago
    Yep! Doing a monthly backup of my mailchimp newsletter, it's too important.
SkyPuncher 8y ago
> So they lied in the first response (all data is wiped and unrecoverable) Not defending Mailchimp, but keep in mind the perspective and context. To a customer support agent using some backend interface, it very well could be "completely wiped". To an escalation team, they may be able to pull it from backups in an "unofficial" manner.
- tjoff 8y ago
  It is still a lie. Also keep in mind the perspective and context that the end user has no way of knowing. And even if the data can be recovered in an unofficial manner whether they will actually bother is highly unlikely if they care as little as they most obviously do. So, as a user it is a pretty safe bet to just assume it is gone (but do keep poking).
  - Spivak 8y ago
    It's a lie that organizations have backups? "Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant that it was deleted from the live servers and that the deletion will propagate through backups depending on the orgs retention policy/requirements.
    - detaro 8y ago
      We don't know the exact messages. If the poster asked for a copy of his data and was told it was deleted, then yes, that was a lie (although possibly the person sending the message genuinely might not have known better, which puts the fault more nebulously at "the company"). If they asked why their account was gone and the response said "all data has been deleted" without offering a copy of it, it's just bad service. (Although given privacy regulations, it's a bad sign if a support agent can't give a precise answer about data stored or at least know not to make unchecked claims about it)
    - dhimes 8y ago
      "Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant To whom? My mother? Nope- she thinks it's gone. So yeah- it's a lie, and you only catch it if you know better. "Yes Dad I did my homework" has pretty much always meant that he hasn't started it yet. No, it's a lie and the organization knows it. They are responsible for training their CS folks.
josefresco 8y ago
> and own SMTP server Good luck with that.
- mkhalil 8y ago
  Way to patronize someone trying to be self-sufficient. Just because you read blog posts titled "DON'T HOST YOUR OWN MAIL", doesn't mean you shouldn't. People are scared of hosting their own mail servers because they a) are told they shouldn't b) don't understand SMTP. I am all for decentralizing this hyper-centralized internet.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Sorry, I'm old enough to have come from the era of "DIY" mass emailing which transitioned (rightfully so) to using providers like Constant Contact/MailChimp. I've seen first hand the drawbacks of emailing thousands of people via your own SMTP server. Blacklists, legal threats, deliverability issues, proper unsubscribe, formatting etc. And this was early 00's when much of the legal framework around email marketing was either non-existent or weakly enforced. Maybe I'm too old? Has email come around to the point where someone can host their own email and send out thousands of emails without having to deal with a mountain of headaches again? That would be sweet, maybe I can go back to telling clients it's okay to paste a massive list of email into their Outlook's BCC field? It would certainly save them some money. I still to this day hear from clients who send "small" mass emails wondering why their friends at AOL, or <insert your ISP here> didn't get the email. Sorry but this is based on my direct, first hand experience with hundreds of small businesses doing this exact thing. I don't base my business model off of some random blog post, I base on years of experience and the lessons learned from getting burned.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      I'm guessing that people who are criticizing you have mostly never run SMTP services for a decently sized ISP (something with its own AS number, big chunk of ARIN IP space, peering, etc). I run my own smtpd for personal purposes, but if I were going to send outgoing customer-contact mails en masse, I certainly wouldn't do it through my personal perfectly-configured postfix system. Things like mailchimp fill a market niche.
ravenstine 8y ago
How difficult was it to set up an SMTP server? I know that merely installing and configuring the software isn't that hard, but the common opinion of late seems to be that setting up things like MX records(I really don't even know how those work) is too onerous. If it's not that difficult, then there really should be fewer people/orgs relying on services like MailChimp.
- owaty 8y ago
  Setting up MX records isn't hard at all but also irrelevant here—it's needed to receive mail. As for sending out mail, one of the difficulties that MailChimp and similar services take care of is keeping the servers' IP addresses out of spam lists.
- ascar 8y ago
  Setting that stuff up is not that hard, you can even just use unix Sendmail. What's hard is actually making sure your emails get delivered and don't end up in the spam folder. Starts with the easy stuff like DMARC (needs DKIM & SPF), goes further to properly warming your IP's, then to properly parsing hundreds of different error response messages and good retry scheduling, and to complex problems like individual mail receivers spam and max-throughput rules. Also these companies sell you the ability to easily make campaigns targeted at a specific subset of your contacts.
- hippich 8y ago
  I am using sovereign - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign It is dated it seems, but still does a job. There are indeed issues with delivery, but you just work through these as they arise. Also, there is no monetization involved, so I do not care that much about delivery rate. But if your profits are directly tied to delivery rate - hoting own SMTP server might not work as well.
protomyth 8y ago
I wonder about how they detect cryptocurrencies and if every mailing list that deals with security is going to get tagged. Makes me wonder if any other words are problematic. I wonder if any historical societies use MailChimp to announce their lectures? Might be interesting to see if they got shutdown. Tumblr might not be the only ones having a bit of a problem in proper detection. Reminds me of the YouTubers who do animated history and their changing of all WWII German logos to the YouTube logo to keep away the demonetization.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  >I wonder if any historical societies use MailChimp I was confused for a second with the mental image of Nero sending out blast emails to Rome's citizens.
- philip1209 8y ago
  I was apart of a finance student group in college. We used MailChimp to tell members about meetings. I remember our account got automatically flagged and locked once because newsletter contents included details about a forthcoming stock pitch presentation, and that apparently was close enough to a ToS violation that MailChimp froze us. The funny thing was that our student group was allowed to directly invest a trivially small portion of the university's endowment in the stock market, so we were not soliciting others to buy stocks - the presentation was a confidential, internal one about how to invest our fund's own money.
johnx123-up 8y ago
FWIW, my partner too had similar experiences and now switched to rayzz.net I agree, backup or self-hosted backup is always necessary.

abc-xyz 8y ago

I hope everyone already using or considering using MailChimp reads this. Denying access to your mailing list even if you violated their terms is insane. Banning accounts with no warning is already bad enough - ideally they'd just disable your ability to send emails until the issue was resolved, but at least I can accept that.. but to steal people's mailing list in the process? What the fuck.

lisper 8y ago
OP here. To be clear, I did not violate their TOS. And deactivating an account for inactivity is not entirely unreasonable, especially a free account. What is unreasonable IMHO, and the reason I want to bring this to people's attention, is deactivating an account without a warning, without even a notification, and with no way to recover. That is a ticking time bomb that I was simply unaware of. I never even imagined that a company as successful and popular as MC could have such an inane policy. Obviously, if I had know, I would have done things differently. All I can do now is sound the alarm so that other people don't step on this land mine. (And maybe public shaming will convince MC to give me my mailing list back, but I'm not counting on it.) P.S. One of the problems here is that "inactivity" is ambiguous in this case. I had not logged in to my account in a long time, but people were signing up for my list. I assumed that would count as "activity".
- RhodesianHunter 8y ago
  Two landmines: 1. The MC one 2. Relying on any free service as an important part of your business. The adage "you get what you pay for" really does tend to hold true.
  - lisper 8y ago
    The irony is that if MC had sent me an email saying that I needed to upgrade to a paid account in order to keep it active, I would have sent them a check without hesitation. That's one of the frustrating things about this. MC has turned this into a lose-lose when it really didn't have to be.
  - dkonofalski 8y ago
    That's the big takeaway here, in my opinion. Regardless of the fault with MailChimp (and I do think they're at fault here), you should never rely on a free service if it's mission critical to your business and there should never be a single point of failure like this. If this really was as critical as OP claims it is, then they should have taken more care to ensure that this wasn't even possible.
megous 8y ago
For data you care about, you have backups. It's better than being angry later, regardless of whether you're angry at some company or at yourself (for not having backups). Backups also make your life longer, because of reduced stress. Otoh, you spend some of that extra time making backups, but it's still a win win, I guess. :D
- jeromegv 8y ago
  Yep! Doing a monthly backup of my mailchimp newsletter, it's too important.

SkyPuncher 8y ago

> So they lied in the first response (all data is wiped and unrecoverable) Not defending Mailchimp, but keep in mind the perspective and context. To a customer support agent using some backend interface, it very well could be "completely wiped". To an escalation team, they may be able to pull it from backups in an "unofficial" manner.

tjoff 8y ago
It is still a lie. Also keep in mind the perspective and context that the end user has no way of knowing. And even if the data can be recovered in an unofficial manner whether they will actually bother is highly unlikely if they care as little as they most obviously do. So, as a user it is a pretty safe bet to just assume it is gone (but do keep poking).
- Spivak 8y ago
  It's a lie that organizations have backups? "Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant that it was deleted from the live servers and that the deletion will propagate through backups depending on the orgs retention policy/requirements.
  - detaro 8y ago
    We don't know the exact messages. If the poster asked for a copy of his data and was told it was deleted, then yes, that was a lie (although possibly the person sending the message genuinely might not have known better, which puts the fault more nebulously at "the company"). If they asked why their account was gone and the response said "all data has been deleted" without offering a copy of it, it's just bad service. (Although given privacy regulations, it's a bad sign if a support agent can't give a precise answer about data stored or at least know not to make unchecked claims about it)
  - dhimes 8y ago
    "Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant To whom? My mother? Nope- she thinks it's gone. So yeah- it's a lie, and you only catch it if you know better. "Yes Dad I did my homework" has pretty much always meant that he hasn't started it yet. No, it's a lie and the organization knows it. They are responsible for training their CS folks.

josefresco 8y ago

> and own SMTP server Good luck with that.

mkhalil 8y ago
Way to patronize someone trying to be self-sufficient. Just because you read blog posts titled "DON'T HOST YOUR OWN MAIL", doesn't mean you shouldn't. People are scared of hosting their own mail servers because they a) are told they shouldn't b) don't understand SMTP. I am all for decentralizing this hyper-centralized internet.
- josefresco 8y ago
  Sorry, I'm old enough to have come from the era of "DIY" mass emailing which transitioned (rightfully so) to using providers like Constant Contact/MailChimp. I've seen first hand the drawbacks of emailing thousands of people via your own SMTP server. Blacklists, legal threats, deliverability issues, proper unsubscribe, formatting etc. And this was early 00's when much of the legal framework around email marketing was either non-existent or weakly enforced. Maybe I'm too old? Has email come around to the point where someone can host their own email and send out thousands of emails without having to deal with a mountain of headaches again? That would be sweet, maybe I can go back to telling clients it's okay to paste a massive list of email into their Outlook's BCC field? It would certainly save them some money. I still to this day hear from clients who send "small" mass emails wondering why their friends at AOL, or <insert your ISP here> didn't get the email. Sorry but this is based on my direct, first hand experience with hundreds of small businesses doing this exact thing. I don't base my business model off of some random blog post, I base on years of experience and the lessons learned from getting burned.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    I'm guessing that people who are criticizing you have mostly never run SMTP services for a decently sized ISP (something with its own AS number, big chunk of ARIN IP space, peering, etc). I run my own smtpd for personal purposes, but if I were going to send outgoing customer-contact mails en masse, I certainly wouldn't do it through my personal perfectly-configured postfix system. Things like mailchimp fill a market niche.

ravenstine 8y ago

How difficult was it to set up an SMTP server? I know that merely installing and configuring the software isn't that hard, but the common opinion of late seems to be that setting up things like MX records(I really don't even know how those work) is too onerous. If it's not that difficult, then there really should be fewer people/orgs relying on services like MailChimp.

owaty 8y ago
Setting up MX records isn't hard at all but also irrelevant here—it's needed to receive mail. As for sending out mail, one of the difficulties that MailChimp and similar services take care of is keeping the servers' IP addresses out of spam lists.
ascar 8y ago
Setting that stuff up is not that hard, you can even just use unix Sendmail. What's hard is actually making sure your emails get delivered and don't end up in the spam folder. Starts with the easy stuff like DMARC (needs DKIM & SPF), goes further to properly warming your IP's, then to properly parsing hundreds of different error response messages and good retry scheduling, and to complex problems like individual mail receivers spam and max-throughput rules. Also these companies sell you the ability to easily make campaigns targeted at a specific subset of your contacts.
hippich 8y ago
I am using sovereign - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign It is dated it seems, but still does a job. There are indeed issues with delivery, but you just work through these as they arise. Also, there is no monetization involved, so I do not care that much about delivery rate. But if your profits are directly tied to delivery rate - hoting own SMTP server might not work as well.

protomyth 8y ago

I wonder about how they detect cryptocurrencies and if every mailing list that deals with security is going to get tagged. Makes me wonder if any other words are problematic. I wonder if any historical societies use MailChimp to announce their lectures? Might be interesting to see if they got shutdown. Tumblr might not be the only ones having a bit of a problem in proper detection. Reminds me of the YouTubers who do animated history and their changing of all WWII German logos to the YouTube logo to keep away the demonetization.

FooHentai 8y ago
>I wonder if any historical societies use MailChimp I was confused for a second with the mental image of Nero sending out blast emails to Rome's citizens.
philip1209 8y ago
I was apart of a finance student group in college. We used MailChimp to tell members about meetings. I remember our account got automatically flagged and locked once because newsletter contents included details about a forthcoming stock pitch presentation, and that apparently was close enough to a ToS violation that MailChimp froze us. The funny thing was that our student group was allowed to directly invest a trivially small portion of the university's endowment in the stock market, so we were not soliciting others to buy stocks - the presentation was a confidential, internal one about how to invest our fund's own money.

johnx123-up 8y ago

FWIW, my partner too had similar experiences and now switched to rayzz.net I agree, backup or self-hosted backup is always necessary.