53 ms·

Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails

246 points by stoev 8y ago

philipodonnell 8y ago
People are getting real confused about "blockchain" as a technology and several specific use cases (cryptocurrencies and ICOs). The article seems to only draw a distinction between crpto and news about crypto. Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?
CamelCaseName 8y ago
I'm surprised they claimed the issue was legality and not deliverability. I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.
stoev 8y ago
When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to. When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people. What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.
- lawnchair 8y ago
  100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.
  - stoev 8y ago
    I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook). Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.
    - Sangermaine 8y ago
      >Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook). Or perhaps Google isn't becoming anything, it was always exactly this and people are only now waking up and looking past Google's PR. That tripe about Google being the champion of the open Internet was just good marketing that duped a lot of people. They're not a selfless group of Internet guardians and never were. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, who ever bought into their "Don't Be Evil" nonsense is a gullible mark. More broadly, maybe this and other recent experiences might help shatter the idea that Silicon Valley and the giant tech companies are not the benevolent stewards of the global infrastructure that they paint themselves as.
    - simias 8y ago
      I genuinely can't fathom this argument at all and it seems rather widespread in these parts. For one thing I'll keep strongly objecting to the use of "censorship" for something as mundane as this. It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship. If you tag the walls of a McDonalds and you get thrown out it's not censorship. If you're using Mailchimp and they say "we don't want to deal with that anymore" it's not censorship. If they based their decision on race, sexual orientation or religion it might be discrimination but Bitcoin is not officially a religion yet. For systems that have a quasi-monopoly or a very dominant position such as Youtube it's true that it can be a problem. Not being able to post your videos on Youtube will probably reduce visibility a lot. That's still not a free-speech issue though, it's a monopoly/lack of competition issue. The solution isn't to force Youtube to host your content, it's to work on having competition in the video hosting space. In this case though it makes no sense. Email is an open infrastructure, anybody can start sending emails whenever they want. You don't have to ask anybody for permission, setup postfix on some dedicated server and mail away.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- payne92 8y ago
  They're not "censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology"; read their policy carefully: >>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<< Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp. As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
  - untog 8y ago
    Counterpoint: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production and sale of handbags, but I don't see Mailchimp blocking that any time soon. I agree that as a private company they can do what they want, but I wonder if they're setting themselves a difficult precedent here.
    - opencl 8y ago
      This isn't a remotely new or unique precedent. Mailchimp and every other email marketing company have always had lists of prohibited content categories. https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://ui.constantcontact.com/CCProhibitedContent.jsp https://ui.constantcontact.com/CCProhibitedContent.jsp https://help.convertkit.com/article/76-terms https://help.convertkit.com/article/76-terms
    - wolph 8y ago
      If enough people report those mails as spam, they'll ban those too. They're simply protecting their business, nothing more, nothing less. Every mail I receive that I didn't sign up for gets a spam report from me. With that in mind, every single ICO mail I've gotten has been spam.
  - lightedman 8y ago
    "sale, exchange, storage," There's no way MailChimp can know about any of this with any reasonable amount of certainty unless they're actively violating their user's privacy and reading the e-mails themselves. Machine learning is horrible with context.
- prklmn 8y ago
  With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud. It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
  - stoev 8y ago
    "They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud." Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists. This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
      maybe they made an analysis which option looses them more money. Hiring 200 moderators, or losing all blockchain companies.
    - beager 8y ago
      There’s no “right thing” here. These companies will do what they legally can to ensure their bottom line is as healthy as possible. If that means making broad strokes, cutting corners, and inflicting collateral damage on customers that are situated in fraud-laden landscapes, they’ll do it. What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
- foepys 8y ago
  Why is Facebook's decision okay but Mailchimp's is evil? If anything Facebook has a social network monopoly while Mailchimp is one of dozens of mailing providers. Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
  - stoev 8y ago
    Because Facebook is blocking ads that will probably not be missed by many people. They still allow you to post about blockchain. Mailchimp apparently doesn't.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Mailchimp is an advertising platform. How is it any different?
- nvr219 8y ago
  > A private company censoring A private company cannot censor.
  - bmelton 8y ago
    A private company can censor, and they often do. That is just not a form of censorship that the first amendment provides you any defense for.
- api 8y ago
  They are trying to get out of the way of the oncoming train of lawsuits and criminal charges that's going to hit us when the ICO/crypto bubble really deflates.
- Spivak 8y ago
  It's not really that different from Google. Mailchimp is a marketing/advertising platform that has every right to be selective about who their clients are^1. Their entire business is about managing their reputation with customers and email providers and blockchain scams are hurting that. Trying to pretend that marketing spam is deservant of free speech considerations and tantamount to 'discussion' is silly. Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so. ^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
- aiCeivi9 8y ago
  Any mail sending company will preemptive ban some clients. If they end up on DBLs or start being blocked by GMail, it is already too late.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform. Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
  - spectre256 8y ago
    This is exactly what I assumed caused them to make this decision. Who knows, a lot of Mailchimp employees might even really like blockchain tech, or be intererested in ICOs, but at the end of the day, if serving ICO/blockchain mail results in lots of emails marked as spam, it puts their whole business at risk.
    - atfoster 8y ago
      Also, they could be held legally liable (or at least: party to a suit that suggests their legal liability) that they don't want—it's risk mitigation. But the question is: What of the other ostensible scams on their platform?
  - ISL 8y ago
    A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs us n% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at n% the usual price." It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping. If n is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.
    - andybak 8y ago
      Isn't the point that Mailchimp is concerned that association with blockchain/ICO scams will affect deliverability across their whole platform?
- vlucas 8y ago
  > What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
- chrononaut 8y ago
  I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example, - Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome. - Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform. - Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Mailchimp's business is specifically to get around spam filters. An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
    - wuliwong 8y ago
      But they are not just banning ICO-related businesses. They are banning all businesses involved with cryptocurrencies. That seems pretty heavy-handed.
    - chrononaut 8y ago
      > An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile. Right, but it's feasible for any other company to build a product that delivers e-mail as effective as Mailchimp to the exact same audience. There isn't an implicit or explicit audience limitation in this case.
- lev99 8y ago
  Why do you think Facebook, Google, and Mailchimp are censoring blockchain related content?
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  >A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. You're being ridiculous and disingenuous. MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans? This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
  - massaman_yams 8y ago
    And I would add that spam, in the US, is "perfectly legal". CAN-SPAM, even if it was aggressively enforced, effectively only requires marketing email to contain a valid postal address for the sender and a working unsubscribe link - it doesn't require opt-in.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Google already bans ads for firearms, fireworks, and tobacco products. There are restrictions on adult content, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and financial services [1]. They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard. [1] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=e...
  - joering2 8y ago
    Just if someone is sleeping at the wheel — this is perfect opportunity to create “google for googles prohibited items”. Nothing illegal in advertising these products.
- cm2187 8y ago
  The same issue happened recently with youtube banning videos from fire arms enthusiasts. One might disagree with their political stance but they are entitled to do so.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  Blame the fraudsters for ruining the research.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  But this is a pretty predictable result of having privately owned services like this be such a big part of the Internet. MailChimp, understandably, doesn't want to be associated with this content, and they are under no obligation to allow it.
- aje403 8y ago
  It would be great if comments like yours included a disclosure of personal crypto currency holdings at the bottom The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I agree and further promote alternative companies that do not censor cryptocurrency-related information.
- paulcole 8y ago
  > they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. Good! They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
- manigandham 8y ago
  None of this is censoring. The government is not prosecuting this speech (which falls under commercial and is not completely free) and closed platforms can do whatever they want. In fact, as the last 100 topics have shown, regulation in digital advertising is sorely needed. Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Email is an open platform, mailchimp is not. This is a distinction your argument fails to accept.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I'm getting really tired of the misuse of the word "censorship" when it comes to topics like this. Mailchimp is not censoring anything. They are not preventing those advertisers from getting their message out. What they are doing is choosing not to partner and work with people they believe might be likely scammers. Something we all do. If you want to complain about that, then you're saying that a person should no longer be able to choose who they do business with. Do you want to be compelled to buy a car from the shady dealer with a reputation for selling lemons? If not, then why should Mailchimp?
scriptstar 8y ago
I thought MailChimp is a forward thinking company and by the looks it’s not
- tzahola 8y ago
  Forward-thinking?? They basically deliver spam on a large scale.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    In the spam economy, up is down and left is right. If they used plain understandable language, they'd never be able to look in the mirror.
nukeop 8y ago
I'm sure there are many people who think this is ok, because it's not the government doing this, but a "private company". Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?
- Veen 8y ago
  The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone. What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.
  - vertex-four 8y ago
    Actually, not anyone with an email server can do it. That's literally MailChimp's value proposition - that they have servers that are trusted by the major email providers and so have high delivery rates. In order to compete with them, you must ensure that your servers are similarly trusted - the process by which this happens being an undocumented black box that is different for each email provider, which often involves having personal contacts at those providers. In other words - there's a high barrier to entry and you can't provide the service at all if you don't have a certain amount of volume to make a certain amount of profit to cover operating costs. Targeting a niche will not provide that volume.
    - evgen 8y ago
      And the reason that MailChimp's servers are trusted for delivery to third parties is that they do front-end filtering to keep spammers and scammers off the platform so that third party mail recipients have a reasonable expectation that they can rely upon MailChimp's due diligence legwork. In this case MailChimp is deciding that the vast majority of ICO and Blockchain marketing is spam/scam email and continuing to allow it has a negative impact on those high delivery rates. Anyone with an email server can try, but given the nature of this particular community it is more likely that this competitor would soon find their email delivery rates hitting 0%.
notahacker 8y ago
> We asked a few more questions about how MailChimp can actually delineate between emails from people involved in the shilling and profiteering of blockchain and ICOs versus people having news-related discussions of blockchain and ICOs (because, LOL, in the current moment, most non-algorithmic humans have a justifiably tough time distinguishing between the two) The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams. Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.
zitterbewegung 8y ago
Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
- mhsabbagh 8y ago
  Mailerlite is good: mailerlite.com
- omarchowdhury 8y ago
  Drip
- jasonlotito 8y ago
  They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO or crypto?
  - zitterbewegung 8y ago
    I plan on doing it. Also, my consulting is related to ICO and crypto now so I don't want to be associated with it.
idontpost4389 8y ago
Every time something like this happens when company XZ decides they will block any content about YX or people associated with it, there's always a lot of discussion about it being considered censorship or why it isn't because they aren't the government but instead a business. I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform. I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result. [0] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminated-against-gay-couple/ https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...
JamesLeonis 8y ago
There's a lot of handwringing over whether Mailchimp did the right/wrong/good/bad/neutral thing, or why ICOs in particular. But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations. In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool? A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years. Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it. The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore. Winter came, and it was us. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
- pjc50 8y ago
  My preferred analogy is with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania : enough fraud can collapse a country.
creeble 8y ago
Not sure why people are so upset with Mailchimp when they are simply reacting to what the blacklist operators do, which is their whole value proposition. They don't want to send content that triggers blacklists, whether that content is for ICOs or Beanie Babies. Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?
_asciiker_ 8y ago
Sentopia.net founder here, I don't believe this is just Mailchimp, we have received a warning from Paypal entitled "Cryptocurrency warning." where it states "(...)we noticed that your activity involves the trading or transfer of crypto currency which is prohibited under our Acceptable Use Policy. As this is not permitted on the PayPal platform we ask that you cease any activity that results in the trading or transfer of crypto currency." We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all. Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.
rargulati 8y ago
What alternatives to Mailchimp would folks recommend? The ideal alternative would have the following desirable components: - A reasonable to use API - A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider) - Not painful to use
- vamin 8y ago
  SendGrid has a newsletter/marketing product called "Marketing Campaigns" that's worth a look, it satisfies those three requirements.
- xtracto 8y ago
  I'd like to second SendGrid. In my previous job, we were using MailChimp until they decided that for some reason some of the communication (the campaings that are created manually via their interface) with our clients was spam. They did not give us any warning but one day they blocked everything, including the API (mandrillapp), which our system was using to send email as part of our process. We moved our mail lists to SendGrid while decoupling the API, using AWS SNS for that. I hate companies that treat you as if they were doing you a favour (we were paying customers, and worse that they don't sit down and talk to understand what is the situation. No business sense at all.
- mvindahl 8y ago
  I would imagine that if all the crypto people moved to some smaller email service with a more lenient policy, this service would end up with far bigger deliverability and blacklisting problems than Mailchimp ever had. From here, it may be possible to kick the bucket down the road a couple of times but basically I think it's game over.
- eterps 8y ago
  See https://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/ https://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/ for a list of alternatives.
- patchfm 8y ago
  Big fan of Mailjet (mailjet.com), biggest email provider in the EU and their API powers SF companies like Product Hunt and MileIQ. Both marketing emails and transactional
kureikain 8y ago
I think this make sense for Mailchimp. The tweet says in 4 weeks advance which I consider long enough to migrate out. Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...
eco 8y ago
I filed two abuse reports with Mailchimp just in the last week over unsolicited ICO mailings. One was for an AIDS vaccine ICO (I don't even know what that means and I don't want to know). I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.
trophycase 8y ago
Will this affect those who directly signed up for a newsletter?
arisAlexis 8y ago
blockchain is a legit technology what's with the hate?
- asdsa5325 8y ago
  Never understood why blockchain is referred to as a "technology". Do we talk about Red black tree technology? Linked list technology? That sounds silly, doesn't it?
  - arisAlexis 8y ago
    never read a more irrelevant comment actually. no blockchain as a tech is not the silly thing here.
logfromblammo 8y ago
It makes more sense if you consider that accounts relating more directly to cryptocurrencies and ICOs are juicier targets for spear-phishers, which makes Mailchimp a target for social engineering and direct intrusion. If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out. It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.
rhemgla_corp 8y ago
Don’t worry! Here is a link to a step by step guide to reinitializing ICO and sending blockchain-related emails: https://2no.co/1QyvB6 https://2no.co/1QyvB6
- Retroity 8y ago
  Don't trust this, 2no.co is an IP logging service. See their website for reference. https://2no.co/ https://2no.co/
rdl 8y ago
So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business. 21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.
TearsInTheRain 8y ago
I would really appreciate it if tech companies stopped acting like everybody's nanny and allowed people to take responsibility for their own actions.
hippich 8y ago
Hm.. We use Mailchimp for our rather smallish mailing list at hashcash.io, and we are "producing", so I guess we are about to be slashed.. For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.

246 points by stoev 8y ago

People are getting real confused about "blockchain" as a technology and several specific use cases (cryptocurrencies and ICOs). The article seems to only draw a distinction between crpto and news about crypto. Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?

CamelCaseName 8y ago

I'm surprised they claimed the issue was legality and not deliverability. I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.

stoev 8y ago

When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to. When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people. What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.

lawnchair 8y ago
100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.
- stoev 8y ago
  I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook). Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.
  - Sangermaine 8y ago
    >Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook). Or perhaps Google isn't becoming anything, it was always exactly this and people are only now waking up and looking past Google's PR. That tripe about Google being the champion of the open Internet was just good marketing that duped a lot of people. They're not a selfless group of Internet guardians and never were. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, who ever bought into their "Don't Be Evil" nonsense is a gullible mark. More broadly, maybe this and other recent experiences might help shatter the idea that Silicon Valley and the giant tech companies are not the benevolent stewards of the global infrastructure that they paint themselves as.
  - simias 8y ago
    I genuinely can't fathom this argument at all and it seems rather widespread in these parts. For one thing I'll keep strongly objecting to the use of "censorship" for something as mundane as this. It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship. If you tag the walls of a McDonalds and you get thrown out it's not censorship. If you're using Mailchimp and they say "we don't want to deal with that anymore" it's not censorship. If they based their decision on race, sexual orientation or religion it might be discrimination but Bitcoin is not officially a religion yet. For systems that have a quasi-monopoly or a very dominant position such as Youtube it's true that it can be a problem. Not being able to post your videos on Youtube will probably reduce visibility a lot. That's still not a free-speech issue though, it's a monopoly/lack of competition issue. The solution isn't to force Youtube to host your content, it's to work on having competition in the video hosting space. In this case though it makes no sense. Email is an open infrastructure, anybody can start sending emails whenever they want. You don't have to ask anybody for permission, setup postfix on some dedicated server and mail away.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
payne92 8y ago
They're not "censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology"; read their policy carefully: >>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<< Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp. As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
- untog 8y ago
  Counterpoint: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production and sale of handbags, but I don't see Mailchimp blocking that any time soon. I agree that as a private company they can do what they want, but I wonder if they're setting themselves a difficult precedent here.
  - opencl 8y ago
    This isn't a remotely new or unique precedent. Mailchimp and every other email marketing company have always had lists of prohibited content categories. https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://ui.constantcontact.com/CCProhibitedContent.jsp https://ui.constantcontact.com/CCProhibitedContent.jsp https://help.convertkit.com/article/76-terms https://help.convertkit.com/article/76-terms
  - wolph 8y ago
    If enough people report those mails as spam, they'll ban those too. They're simply protecting their business, nothing more, nothing less. Every mail I receive that I didn't sign up for gets a spam report from me. With that in mind, every single ICO mail I've gotten has been spam.
- lightedman 8y ago
  "sale, exchange, storage," There's no way MailChimp can know about any of this with any reasonable amount of certainty unless they're actively violating their user's privacy and reading the e-mails themselves. Machine learning is horrible with context.
prklmn 8y ago
With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud. It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
- stoev 8y ago
  "They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud." Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists. This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    maybe they made an analysis which option looses them more money. Hiring 200 moderators, or losing all blockchain companies.
  - beager 8y ago
    There’s no “right thing” here. These companies will do what they legally can to ensure their bottom line is as healthy as possible. If that means making broad strokes, cutting corners, and inflicting collateral damage on customers that are situated in fraud-laden landscapes, they’ll do it. What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
foepys 8y ago
Why is Facebook's decision okay but Mailchimp's is evil? If anything Facebook has a social network monopoly while Mailchimp is one of dozens of mailing providers. Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
- stoev 8y ago
  Because Facebook is blocking ads that will probably not be missed by many people. They still allow you to post about blockchain. Mailchimp apparently doesn't.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Mailchimp is an advertising platform. How is it any different?
nvr219 8y ago
> A private company censoring A private company cannot censor.
- bmelton 8y ago
  A private company can censor, and they often do. That is just not a form of censorship that the first amendment provides you any defense for.
api 8y ago
They are trying to get out of the way of the oncoming train of lawsuits and criminal charges that's going to hit us when the ICO/crypto bubble really deflates.
Spivak 8y ago
It's not really that different from Google. Mailchimp is a marketing/advertising platform that has every right to be selective about who their clients are^1. Their entire business is about managing their reputation with customers and email providers and blockchain scams are hurting that. Trying to pretend that marketing spam is deservant of free speech considerations and tantamount to 'discussion' is silly. Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so. ^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
aiCeivi9 8y ago
Any mail sending company will preemptive ban some clients. If they end up on DBLs or start being blocked by GMail, it is already too late.
spamizbad 8y ago
Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform. Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
- spectre256 8y ago
  This is exactly what I assumed caused them to make this decision. Who knows, a lot of Mailchimp employees might even really like blockchain tech, or be intererested in ICOs, but at the end of the day, if serving ICO/blockchain mail results in lots of emails marked as spam, it puts their whole business at risk.
  - atfoster 8y ago
    Also, they could be held legally liable (or at least: party to a suit that suggests their legal liability) that they don't want—it's risk mitigation. But the question is: What of the other ostensible scams on their platform?
- ISL 8y ago
  A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs us n% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at n% the usual price." It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping. If n is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.
  - andybak 8y ago
    Isn't the point that Mailchimp is concerned that association with blockchain/ICO scams will affect deliverability across their whole platform?
vlucas 8y ago
> What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
chrononaut 8y ago
I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example, - Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome. - Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform. - Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
- Retric 8y ago
  Mailchimp's business is specifically to get around spam filters. An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
  - wuliwong 8y ago
    But they are not just banning ICO-related businesses. They are banning all businesses involved with cryptocurrencies. That seems pretty heavy-handed.
  - chrononaut 8y ago
    > An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile. Right, but it's feasible for any other company to build a product that delivers e-mail as effective as Mailchimp to the exact same audience. There isn't an implicit or explicit audience limitation in this case.
lev99 8y ago
Why do you think Facebook, Google, and Mailchimp are censoring blockchain related content?
Sangermaine 8y ago
>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. You're being ridiculous and disingenuous. MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans? This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
- massaman_yams 8y ago
  And I would add that spam, in the US, is "perfectly legal". CAN-SPAM, even if it was aggressively enforced, effectively only requires marketing email to contain a valid postal address for the sender and a working unsubscribe link - it doesn't require opt-in.
skybrian 8y ago
Google already bans ads for firearms, fireworks, and tobacco products. There are restrictions on adult content, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and financial services [1]. They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard. [1] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=e...
- joering2 8y ago
  Just if someone is sleeping at the wheel — this is perfect opportunity to create “google for googles prohibited items”. Nothing illegal in advertising these products.
cm2187 8y ago
The same issue happened recently with youtube banning videos from fire arms enthusiasts. One might disagree with their political stance but they are entitled to do so.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Blame the fraudsters for ruining the research.
emodendroket 8y ago
But this is a pretty predictable result of having privately owned services like this be such a big part of the Internet. MailChimp, understandably, doesn't want to be associated with this content, and they are under no obligation to allow it.
aje403 8y ago
It would be great if comments like yours included a disclosure of personal crypto currency holdings at the bottom The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
wuliwong 8y ago
I agree and further promote alternative companies that do not censor cryptocurrency-related information.
paulcole 8y ago
> they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not. Good! They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
manigandham 8y ago
None of this is censoring. The government is not prosecuting this speech (which falls under commercial and is not completely free) and closed platforms can do whatever they want. In fact, as the last 100 topics have shown, regulation in digital advertising is sorely needed. Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
notyourwork 8y ago
Email is an open platform, mailchimp is not. This is a distinction your argument fails to accept.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
I'm getting really tired of the misuse of the word "censorship" when it comes to topics like this. Mailchimp is not censoring anything. They are not preventing those advertisers from getting their message out. What they are doing is choosing not to partner and work with people they believe might be likely scammers. Something we all do. If you want to complain about that, then you're saying that a person should no longer be able to choose who they do business with. Do you want to be compelled to buy a car from the shady dealer with a reputation for selling lemons? If not, then why should Mailchimp?

scriptstar 8y ago

I thought MailChimp is a forward thinking company and by the looks it’s not

tzahola 8y ago
Forward-thinking?? They basically deliver spam on a large scale.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  In the spam economy, up is down and left is right. If they used plain understandable language, they'd never be able to look in the mirror.

nukeop 8y ago

I'm sure there are many people who think this is ok, because it's not the government doing this, but a "private company". Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?

Veen 8y ago
The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone. What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.
- vertex-four 8y ago
  Actually, not anyone with an email server can do it. That's literally MailChimp's value proposition - that they have servers that are trusted by the major email providers and so have high delivery rates. In order to compete with them, you must ensure that your servers are similarly trusted - the process by which this happens being an undocumented black box that is different for each email provider, which often involves having personal contacts at those providers. In other words - there's a high barrier to entry and you can't provide the service at all if you don't have a certain amount of volume to make a certain amount of profit to cover operating costs. Targeting a niche will not provide that volume.
  - evgen 8y ago
    And the reason that MailChimp's servers are trusted for delivery to third parties is that they do front-end filtering to keep spammers and scammers off the platform so that third party mail recipients have a reasonable expectation that they can rely upon MailChimp's due diligence legwork. In this case MailChimp is deciding that the vast majority of ICO and Blockchain marketing is spam/scam email and continuing to allow it has a negative impact on those high delivery rates. Anyone with an email server can try, but given the nature of this particular community it is more likely that this competitor would soon find their email delivery rates hitting 0%.

notahacker 8y ago

> We asked a few more questions about how MailChimp can actually delineate between emails from people involved in the shilling and profiteering of blockchain and ICOs versus people having news-related discussions of blockchain and ICOs (because, LOL, in the current moment, most non-algorithmic humans have a justifiably tough time distinguishing between the two) The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams. Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.

zitterbewegung 8y ago

Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?

mhsabbagh 8y ago
Mailerlite is good: mailerlite.com
omarchowdhury 8y ago
Drip
jasonlotito 8y ago
They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO or crypto?
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  I plan on doing it. Also, my consulting is related to ICO and crypto now so I don't want to be associated with it.

idontpost4389 8y ago

Every time something like this happens when company XZ decides they will block any content about YX or people associated with it, there's always a lot of discussion about it being considered censorship or why it isn't because they aren't the government but instead a business. I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform. I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result. [0] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminated-against-gay-couple/ https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...

JamesLeonis 8y ago

There's a lot of handwringing over whether Mailchimp did the right/wrong/good/bad/neutral thing, or why ICOs in particular. But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations. In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool? A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years. Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it. The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore. Winter came, and it was us. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

pjc50 8y ago
My preferred analogy is with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania : enough fraud can collapse a country.

creeble 8y ago

Not sure why people are so upset with Mailchimp when they are simply reacting to what the blacklist operators do, which is their whole value proposition. They don't want to send content that triggers blacklists, whether that content is for ICOs or Beanie Babies. Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?

_asciiker_ 8y ago

Sentopia.net founder here, I don't believe this is just Mailchimp, we have received a warning from Paypal entitled "Cryptocurrency warning." where it states "(...)we noticed that your activity involves the trading or transfer of crypto currency which is prohibited under our Acceptable Use Policy. As this is not permitted on the PayPal platform we ask that you cease any activity that results in the trading or transfer of crypto currency." We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all. Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.

rargulati 8y ago

What alternatives to Mailchimp would folks recommend? The ideal alternative would have the following desirable components: - A reasonable to use API - A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider) - Not painful to use

vamin 8y ago
SendGrid has a newsletter/marketing product called "Marketing Campaigns" that's worth a look, it satisfies those three requirements.
xtracto 8y ago
I'd like to second SendGrid. In my previous job, we were using MailChimp until they decided that for some reason some of the communication (the campaings that are created manually via their interface) with our clients was spam. They did not give us any warning but one day they blocked everything, including the API (mandrillapp), which our system was using to send email as part of our process. We moved our mail lists to SendGrid while decoupling the API, using AWS SNS for that. I hate companies that treat you as if they were doing you a favour (we were paying customers, and worse that they don't sit down and talk to understand what is the situation. No business sense at all.
mvindahl 8y ago
I would imagine that if all the crypto people moved to some smaller email service with a more lenient policy, this service would end up with far bigger deliverability and blacklisting problems than Mailchimp ever had. From here, it may be possible to kick the bucket down the road a couple of times but basically I think it's game over.
eterps 8y ago
See https://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/ https://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/ for a list of alternatives.
patchfm 8y ago
Big fan of Mailjet (mailjet.com), biggest email provider in the EU and their API powers SF companies like Product Hunt and MileIQ. Both marketing emails and transactional

kureikain 8y ago

I think this make sense for Mailchimp. The tweet says in 4 weeks advance which I consider long enough to migrate out. Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...

eco 8y ago

I filed two abuse reports with Mailchimp just in the last week over unsolicited ICO mailings. One was for an AIDS vaccine ICO (I don't even know what that means and I don't want to know). I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.

trophycase 8y ago

Will this affect those who directly signed up for a newsletter?

arisAlexis 8y ago

blockchain is a legit technology what's with the hate?

asdsa5325 8y ago
Never understood why blockchain is referred to as a "technology". Do we talk about Red black tree technology? Linked list technology? That sounds silly, doesn't it?
- arisAlexis 8y ago
  never read a more irrelevant comment actually. no blockchain as a tech is not the silly thing here.

logfromblammo 8y ago

It makes more sense if you consider that accounts relating more directly to cryptocurrencies and ICOs are juicier targets for spear-phishers, which makes Mailchimp a target for social engineering and direct intrusion. If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out. It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.

rhemgla_corp 8y ago

Don’t worry! Here is a link to a step by step guide to reinitializing ICO and sending blockchain-related emails: https://2no.co/1QyvB6 https://2no.co/1QyvB6

Retroity 8y ago
Don't trust this, 2no.co is an IP logging service. See their website for reference. https://2no.co/ https://2no.co/

rdl 8y ago

So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business. 21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.

TearsInTheRain 8y ago

I would really appreciate it if tech companies stopped acting like everybody's nanny and allowed people to take responsibility for their own actions.

hippich 8y ago

Hm.. We use Mailchimp for our rather smallish mailing list at hashcash.io, and we are "producing", so I guess we are about to be slashed.. For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.