
MailChimp deleted my account with no warning - lisper
https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/12/mailchimp-deleted-my-account-with-no.html
======
hippich
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.

~~~
SkyPuncher
> 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.

~~~
mojowo11
As a manager of a customer service team, everyone on my team knows exactly
whether something has been "totally wiped" or not, regardless of whether it's
something that would require developer intervention to recover. To have your
reps not understand this and ultimately mislead the customer (or, in this
case, I suppose former customer would be more accurate) is a
management/training problem, and what the rep ultimately said on behalf of the
company was a lie as a result.

~~~
dkonofalski
I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly because sometimes you don't want
to set the expectation with a front-line representative that the data is
recoverable. In many cases, you don't want reps promising to recover data
that's potentially unrecoverable. It's one thing to recover data in the event
of a mistake on behalf of the company but that should require a conversation
with someone outside of front-line customer service. I've been in situations
too many times where our front-line team knew when something had not been
"totally wiped" and they turned out to be "totally wrong" because they were
aware that we kept backups but not aware that we had a strict retention policy
outside of a specific timeframe or, in other cases, where a hardware failure
caused a loss of a specific set of data because it was marked for deletion and
wasn't scheduled to have a backup anyways. The customer had cancelled their
account and agreed to losing their data but didn't actually read the terms of
the cancellation they agreed to and then returned over a month later asking
for their data and a rep told them that it's not really lost because we keep
backups every 30, 60, and 90 days. That part was true for live accounts but
not for deleted accounts.

In other words, data recovery that can't be handled by the customer service
reps and that requires developer intervention should be a "surprise and
delight" sort of situation and not a "customer should expect this" type of
situation.

~~~
lolc
Saying you know when you don't is a lie. Instructing people to say they know
when they don't is instructing them to lie on your behalf.

The answer should be: "I can't know." Followed by one of: (1) Let me connect
you to someone who can know (2) Let me tell you how much it costs to find out
(or 3) Also we don't care.

That would be honest. Not saying it's easy.

~~~
dkonofalski
>Saying you know when you don't is a lie. Instructing people to say they know
when they don't is instructing them to lie on your behalf.

Because, in that case, the intent of the statement is to deceive. If the
intent of the statement is simply to not set an expectation that can't be
guaranteed rather than to intentionally deceive, then it's not a lie, in my
opinion.

I work in audio editing and recovery/enhancement and there are situations on a
regular basis where we tell customers that their audio can't be recovered. I
don't think we're lying to customers in saying that despite the fact that, in
some cases, we may be able to recover or enhance the audio to the point where
it's usable if we invested an exorbitant amount of time on it. In the most
literal sense, yes we _can_ recover the audio but in the practical sense and,
most importantly, to the customer we can't recover the audio in any meaningful
way because they either can't afford the work necessary, we don't have the
resources to devote to that work, or we can't guarantee that, even if we can
recover it, it's acceptable for whatever purpose they need it for despite
being "good enough" for us.

~~~
lolc
I agree with what you say. I think the trouble starts when the economical
burden of recovery is not on the customer, but on the company.

If I tell somebody that something's unrevocerable because I know they wouldn't
want to pay the recovery, I'm not lying. But saying nothing can be done when
I'm just afraid of the cost of righting my mistake: that is lying.

------
jrockway
We've had a similar experience. We use them for both marketing mass emails and
for ingesting support ticket emails (I believe that's through Mandrill).
Someone sent a marketing email they didn't like (they said another one of
their customers complained about it, or something; literally one complaint)
and so they silently shut off our incoming email. We noticed it when one of
our customers called to ask why we hadn't replied to one of their support
tickets. They didn't bother to tell us.

It's a big bag of "do not recommend".

(As for how we manage to use them for incoming email; emails go to a gsuite
inbox, which forwards them to MC/Mandrill, when then calls a webhook to
actually process the email further. Yes, we could do way better with our own
SMTP server that cuts them out. I think this architecture was chosen to have a
failsafe in the event that our services all go down.)

~~~
briandear
And yet I still get junk from MC senders for which I never subscribed. I
report as spam, but those people still keep sending with no problems.
(Anecdote, I report as spam an email sent to me@mybusiness.com, then get
emails from the same sender at info@mybusiness.com, support@mybusiness.com and
finally to emails that aren’t even real such as contrived
first_initial_lastname@mybusiness.com (which aren’t in use but go to a
catchall, so clearly some “marketing person” just added me to a list without
any consent at all.)

At all times these are reported as spam. Then, when we, a few years ago sent
out a new feature announcement and a request for a follow up appointment, our
account gets frozen for sending unsolicited marketing emails — to our actual
customers who have opted in to our emails! Emails that complied with every bit
of the anti-spam laws. So Mailchimp arbitrarily lets through their massive
enterprise senders sending actual unsolicited emails but freezes their smaller
(but still paid) customers sending marketing to actual, current customers.

Anecdotes aren’t data, but for us, it was reality.

~~~
ghostly_s
I seem to be constantly checking "I never signed up for this mail list"
buttons on MailChimp unsubscribe pages. Eventually I got curious if this
actually does anything and looked into it; as far as I could tell from their
docs, it does nothing but inform the _mailer_ that you are of the opinion that
you never subscribed to their list. Very useful.

~~~
massaman_yams
No, MC definitely uses that data as part of their anti-spam operations.
Source: have attended a few presentations by MC anti-abuse people.

------
neya
It boggles my mind why anyone would use MailChimp. The most important trait
for a good organization is ethics. When they acquired Mandrill, they did the
same to PAYING customers[1]. They even turned off comments on the blog post of
the announcement. And ever since they did these shady things, they super-
charged their SEO to hide any mention of this fiasco. If you do a quick Google
search for "mailchimp mandrill" you would no longer see the slew of articles
of rants of paying customers like you used to. Really, the worst ethics I've
seen in any internet company.

I stopped using MailChimp ever since and even though their integration is much
simpler, I do not use them for my clients. Every now and then I do have one or
two clients wanting to integrate with them, but I do honestly warn them of
what they're capable of and be the judge.

It's not like they're cheap. Their plans are pricey and yeah, they do have
good deliverability, but the competition has caught up ever since. The only
way they're able to keep existing accounts is by passive-aggressive scare
"Watchout, we have the best deliverability and if you move elsewhere for price
concerns, you have tons of these problems to deal with, including
deliverability, so stick with us".

This is 2018. No one should be using MailChimp. There isn't any good reason
to.

[1] [http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-
betrayal/](http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-betrayal/)

~~~
jacobbudin
> It boggles my mind why anyone would use MailChimp.

I've had similar bad experiences with MailChimp and Mandrill. Their customer
support is very defensive over both technical and account issues, even when
you've already done the work of identifying the problem for them.

People continue to use MailChimp because of its marketing halo. They even had
a flattering New York Times feature in 2016.

Luckily most emails we send are transactional so new projects are able to use
AWS SES, Postmark, or SendGrid.

------
hobofan
Been there, done that. Two years ago Mailchimp deactivated our account without
notice, and no explanation at first. This also impacted our transactional
mails via Mandrill as the account was linked to the deactivated Mailchimp
account. Even after a lot of pleading they didn't reactivate it, and there
responses were generally unhelpful and in hostile language.

In the end it turned out that appart from our paid(!) main account, an intern
from the marketing department created another account some time ago which
hadn't been in use for a few months already.

So in the end a coworker and me spent the night rewriting our transactional
mailing to hook up Sendgrid instead, with no problems since then.

Fuck MailChimp + Mandrill!

~~~
artificial
Did you ever consider SES? I've been using Sendgrid for about two years to
handle lead distribution to client CRMs (Automotive). They have good
documentation and are super easy to integrate. Although, I wish the delivery
notification endpoint supported multiple webhooks.

~~~
hobofan
I don't think we really considered SES, to be honest.

We had to move pretty fast when we made the switch. My coworker tried Mailgun
(which didn't verify our domain fast enough), while I tried Sendgrid.

There was also the added bonus that we had a free paid tier from Sendgrid as
part of our accalerator program, so we had planned to switch to Sendgrid
anyway.

------
nlh
I’m glad this got posted and I hope this gets resolved and MailChimp does the
right thing (I’ve also upvoted the OP).

But man, I don’t envy companies deep in the anti-spam/fraud business. The
impression I’ve gotten is that when you act with a lighter touch and/or give
lots of info about why an account was closed, spammers/fraudsters weaponize
that and either figure out how to bypass your controls or social engineer your
support.

I hope I’m wrong. Any thoughts on how a company should balance good service to
users (and false positives) with the need to fight black hats?

~~~
awj
> Any thoughts on how a company should balance good service to users (and
> false positives) with the need to fight black hats?

Charge money.

A big part of why MailChimp responded this way is that they have a _very_
generous free plan. With that they can't afford to dig deep on free plans that
violate ToS. You'll get buried under the weight of support/vetting for that.

Once you start charging even a little bit, the amount of spam/fraud BS you
have to deal with _plummets_.

Every hurdle your free plan introduces to blasting out emails adds friction
for spammers. Give them enough friction and they'll move on somewhere else.
Forcing them to provide a valid credit card before they can send emails is a
_great_ way to add that friction.

~~~
lisper
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716357)

------
the_dege
The real problem is that support and service notification on the internet are
often really bad. The giants can afford to do whatever they want without
drawbacks. The really small players on the other hand can disappear without
notice. Just the other day one of our VPSs went down, the web panel was also
down, we discovered on twitter, posted by another user that the hosting
company was closing in 4 days. They haven't even send an email to the
customers. The CEO had already removed the company from his linkedin profile!

~~~
imPndy
did that host happen to be Hiformance? pretty much what you said is happening
there (servers going down, no contact from host etc)

~~~
the_dege
Exactly! A dirty cheap service, but I guess that the low price was what made
them close... As an update to the first post, now the website works again.

------
dhd415
I've also had friends who have had their MailChimp accounts deleted or locked
without explanation, warning, or recourse, so I wouldn't rely on MC
specifically for anything business-critical. That said, if you have business-
critical data on any cloud provider, you should be exporting periodic backups
of that data to another provider so you don't lose access to it all if a
single provider shuts down your account.

------
lisper
News flash: MailChimp just reinstated my account! Thank you, HN community, for
your help.

~~~
beckler
yeah, but it's sad that this is basically the only way to get them to do it.

~~~
lisper
Indeed. Once the dust settles I plan to write up a detailed post-mortem.
There's more to say.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
If anyone from MailChimp is reading this: a postmortem from your side would be
greatly appreciated too.

Currently, I assume the only thing such a postmortem would contain is "one of
our anti-abuse system considered the account abusive, so our default process
kicked in, some sort of escalation review process (automated or human) also
flagged it as abusive, so no further escalation was allowed, and we don't
really have a way to keep this from happening over and over again". (Which, to
be fair, is probably true of _any_ service that has to deal with abuse at
scale.)

Anything better than that (e.g. providing notifications on takedowns, offering
data take-out, or at least explaining why this isn't in place) is probably
worth posting.

------
lgleason
I live in Atlanta where MailChimp is headquartered. Beyond their horrible
customer service and stories I've heard from people who work there they are
one of the worst tech community members in the city. There have been instances
of managers from there Doxing people, trying to get code school students
kicked out of their programs for respectfully expressing opinions in local
community groups etc. that they disagree with.

------
balls187
We were evaluating using MailChimp for our email campaigns, but I am going to
raise this with the boss.

Having ToS issues is one thing. Deleting/banning accounts without any notice
is another.

Unacceptable.

Major shout out to Stripe. They believed we were in violation of their ToS,
notified us immediately, and gave us 7 days to find an alternative including a
competitor that would accept our business.

Once I contacted their support, I was able to confirm with them, that in fact,
we were in compliance, and the crisis was averted. But had they just shut us
off without warning, that would have been a disaster.

------
BenoitEssiambre
To add a data point to this, I created a MailChimp account a couple of years
ago. I never used it as other projects became priority. Recently I decided I
might give it a shot again. Tried to login. My account is deleted and my email
banned. I'm not tied to any weird or shady business. Dodged a bullet I guess.

------
zachruss92
They did the same to me. I reached out to their support and they just
recommended I create a new account. No idea how a business can do that and
expect users to be ok with it. They lost me as a customer and I will no longer
recommend them to any of my clients.

------
garraeth
A similar thing happened to me while using their Mandrill system. After years
of using it with no issues, all of a sudden no emails were getting out. They
shut us down without notice and without recourse. We were sending simple
support emails, and auto-emails (when you register, forgot your password,
etc).

Absolutely would never recommend.

~~~
1001101
Did you continue to get billed for it?

~~~
garraeth
Thankfully no.

------
data_spy
They banned me after migrating an email list over because they said I couldn't
confirm how I got the emails. It was weird because the 80 emails were
newsletter sign-ups from my website. After that happened I never went back.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Kind of odd considering they changed to make single opt-in the default on new
mailing lists.

~~~
willio58
They’re covering their asses only legally speaking.

------
startupdiscuss
Tech support issues on HN are like the tech equivalent of putting up medical
bills in a newspaper.

The situation is so unfair and one is so powerless, that the best way to
resolve it is to get dozens of other people involved.

This is probably tiring to oneself and all the other people who have to work
up into outrage. There really ought to be a more systematic way to work
resolve these things.

------
mdolon
This exact same thing happened to me, resulting in the loss of hundreds of
emails collected over the years from my website.

Any recommendations on alternatives?

~~~
ryanmercer
>Any recommendations

Uh, regularly export your list?

------
ccnafr
Not the first time this happened. Company needs to get sued a few times to
learn its lesson. Just what needs to happen to PayPal as well.

~~~
nradov
Sued based on which legal theory? What are the monetary damages? Where is the
contract violation?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Squatters rights.

------
nik736
What I don't understand is... when this data is oh so important, where is the
backup?

~~~
abc-xyz
Because not everyone using a mailing list service is technically capable of
doing this, or understands why it's even necessary? I never used MailChimp but
if I did then I would assume that the mailing lists I built with their service
would be 99.999% secure, and that I'd always be able to access it even if they
went out of business. Reading this thread with many users claiming similar
experiences is quite frankly shocking.

~~~
cmorgan31
What drives the assumption that their mailing lists would always be available
to you even if they went out of business or that they are almost perfectly
secure? Is it due to standards set by large companies or just an idealized
desire?

~~~
abc-xyz
Because I assume they use Google/Amazon cloud services which are designed for
99.99999999% durability, just as I assume they often make backups (it's not
like it would be expensive for them to backup mailing lists every hour or so).

If they went out of business then I would also assume they would give
customers at least several months to export their mailing lists.

Edit: for some reason I'm not allowed to post new comments (presumably because
of the downvotes to my other comments), so I'll just reply here: Would it be
naive/fraudulent to promise the same durability as the storage service you're
using? After all you're just feeding the data to their service through their
API. I of course wouldn't promise this kind of up-time, but once the data is
successfully saved then I fail to see why it would be wrong to make such
claims. Assuming you also made regular backups of the data you feed to their
services (which I certainly hope MailChimp do) then you can be even more
confident that the data won't be lost. If Google/Amazon banned the accounts
storing the mailing lists then I'm sure it could be recovered, especially by a
company of MailChimps size.

~~~
cmorgan31
Thanks for answering! I think your perspective is becoming more common. It's
not like MailChimp is a start-up, so these assumptions aren't inherently
crazy.

~~~
megous
At some point people started expecting unreasonable things from random free
services on the internet. I still think it's ridiculous.

I hope that in the future, schools will also teach some basics of computer
hygiene in IT classes, and how to behave on the internet.

Things like what internet services are, why backups are important, and how to
practically do them, how to evaluate risks when communicating on the internet,
how people are harmed on the internet (typical scams, phishing, running
untrusted programs, ransomware,...), what privacy is on the internet, how to
choose passwords, etc.

~~~
cmorgan31
Yes, it's fair to say that the expectation presented by the FAANGs are
polluting the general expectations of users. You have to live up to a higher
standard which often requires you to leverage their cloud offerings. This
higher expectation isn't necessarily a bad thing on its face as a better user
experience often helps your business succeed.

It would be wonderful if we taught people how to navigate the digital age. It
would be similar to a driving course or personal finance. I know I had none of
the above when I went through school, so I won't hold my breath, but I would
support an initiative to provide more practical skills in school.

------
slig
If you're looking for alternatives, I can't recommend MailWizz + Amazon SES
enough. You can host it on a $5 VPS and you pay just what you consume from
Amazon.

~~~
mtarnovan
Last I checked SES had quite poor deliverability, at least compared to MC,
sendgrid &co. Has that improved?

------
_Codemonkeyism
Some years ago MailChimp decided to act as a cash cow, invest very little if
anything (except a recent redesign). Mandrill still isn't integrated after
they combined the two services some years ago.

(PS: We've been a customer for many years but migrated away lately)

------
scosman
Reminds me of when MailChimp quadrupled Mandrill prices, with almost no
notice. Severe disruption to our company; I had to pull engineers off key
projects to migrate out email system.

I'm not sure why people keep trusting them given their track record.

~~~
mrobins
That incident still gets me angry. Migrating wasn't a horrible experience but
they way they went about it demonstrated they couldn't be trusted with
anything remotely mission-critical.

------
Sephr
It seems like any MailChimp mailing list emails containing the word "crypto"
set off automated systems which result in account bans.

This is an extremely poor anti-spam "hueristic" (if it even deserves to be
called that) and I would never do business with a company that handles anti-
spam like this.

------
ksec
240 Comment and not a single one defending Mailchimp.

Over the years, there are many articles on HN about Mails. And the general (
or even golden rule ) was not to setup your own server, it is too much hassle,
waste of time. And just use something like MailChimp instead.

I think there might be a few mention for Mailgun, but most of the time it was
MailChimp for recommendation.

And over the years NOT A SINGLE report or comment of their bad experience. It
was all singing and praise.

Now something happened, and all of a sudden you get a huge flux of people
mentioning it was similar to their own experience as well.

And this isn't the first time I see something like this. It wasn't until the
ZOHO incident did people start telling their horror story about Namecheap and
Godaddy.

Is there a psychological term for this? You knew it was bad, but you didn't
tell your story then.

------
oblib
I can certainly sympathize with this. Over the past 20 years I've gotten bit
several times by 3rd party email services shutting down with little or no
notice and even had access to my email services sold to spammers by the
providers I was paying for it.

The last time it happened I'd created a "Mandrill" account while developing an
app and just a few weeks before releasing it I got a notice saying "Mandrill
has been acquired by MailChimp" and I would need to create a new account with
MailChimp.

That was last straw for me using 3rd Party email services. I spent the next
several weeks setting up a "MAIB" (Mail-in-a-Box) server on a DigitalOcean
VPS.

Setting up that server on DigitalOcean had it's own hurdles I didn't see
coming, one of which was my MAIB server IP was black listed before I even sent
an email because it was running on the DO platform. I contacted DOs support
and all they could offer was "We recommend you don't use DO for email
servers". Apparently spammers find it appealing to do this too so some email
services, like AOL, Hotmail, etc block everything coming from DO and require
you request to be whitelisted.

Because of that it ended up taking a few more months to reveal and deal with
all the issues that popped up and that was painful too. It ended up being
worth the effort though.

It's been working great for over 2 years now and there are some additional
benefits I'd not expected when I first started working on it. One of the
biggest is MAIB has a built-in DNS server too. I didn't use it at first but
after playing with it a bit I ended up moving all my sites over to it and
configuring my desktop Mac to use it first.

Given the chance the only thing I'd do different is to set up my own email
server before I ran into this kind of "Mailchimp" problem again (because my
experience is it will) so I could work through those issues first and
transition to it from a 3rd party service at my leisure.

It's not an easy slog, but MAIB made it a hellava lot easier.

[https://mailinabox.email](https://mailinabox.email)

~~~
techwolf
I run my personal mailserver on a DigitalOcean VPS, but I wouldn't recommend
it. I've never had blacklisting issues and email works fine over IPv4, but
outbound connections on all mail ports (25, 109, 110, 143, 465, 587, 995; not
993, oddly) are silently dropped over IPv6. They assign each host a IPv6 /124,
instead of a /64 or better like other providers, so they block outbound SMTP
for spam prevention. The other blocked ports aren't documented and I've had a
support ticket open since November about getting them unblocked that looks
like it won't be resolved anytime soon.

DO has been great for everything else I hosted there, but they're a bad choice
for a mailserver.

~~~
oblib
I can't say I'd recommend DO for an email server either. I wasn't blacklisted
per se, I was blocked before I even sent any email and needed to be
whitelisted.

I won't say DO is a bad choice for a mailserver, nor a good one. I just did a
quick search to see if that's changed in the past few years and came across
"Helm", but that's not really a "good" option either.

The real problem is there is no "good" choice for a dedicated mailserver or
service provider.

------
noonespecial
Once again, the lesson shines through the "clouds"; Data that isn't on _your_
hard disk isn't yours.

------
ryandrake
“Service Xyz suddenly canceled my account and banned me for no reason and I no
longer have access to critical data!”

How many times does this story have to be posted for us as a user community to
get some sense and stop relying on unaccountable cloud services to host
critical data or perform critical tasks? It seems like a similar story gets
posted every week. Back up your data, people, and whenever possible, self-
host.

For every online account you have, ask yourself: what is the consequence of me
permanently losing this account and all data associated with it? If the answer
is “catastrophic loss” then FFS do something about it!

------
lotto-win
I agree Tech companies are getting more and more away from the customer[1],
due to policies that are non-disclosed. BUT in your case - give it some time.
This is premature. [1][https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
features/who-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-
will-fix-facebook-759916/)

------
jmount
MailChimp removed half my users from a mailing list that I hadn't sent out
recently claiming lots of unverified sign-ups and spam complaints. The sign-
ups where all through MailChimp, so I don't know why then didn't like them.
Actually I suspect MailChimp may have sent out on the list without my
permission for an extra GPDR handshake and triggered a list of spam
complaints.

------
volandovengo
MailChimp likes doing stuff like this.

When I once travelled to Ghana, I discovered that because I was in Ghana, they
blocked my entire account without warning.

------
ta3216
I just exported my subscriber list for safe keeping. If I could automate this
as a monthly job that would be even better.

~~~
harowitzblack
Hey, I'm building a tool that does exactly this. It automatically backs up
your email subs and stores them in google sheets. It's still in dev, but feel
free to subscribe [https://stompapp.xyz/](https://stompapp.xyz/)

------
ozten
As a general practice for disaster recovery, I think it would be good to
automate a regular backup of your MailChimp account
[https://mailchimp.com/help/export-and-back-up-account-
data/](https://mailchimp.com/help/export-and-back-up-account-data/)

------
darthpaul4651
Coming from being a former MailChimp tech support agent (regular tech support,
not compliance support), I can say that while I was in tech support, all
account data is accessible on the company’s backend and for closed accounts,
their data is available for 3 months after the close date. Open accounts
aren’t pushed to dormant status until 2 years after no send and no login
activity. Pretty happy that I’m no longer there; MailChimp was fine but they
don’t pay their support agents enough for the kinds of stress and bad
management they have to go through.

------
FlorianRappl
I see why people like using something like MailChimp - but I would personally
never do (nor advocate) doing so. Your mailing list(s) / subscribers are very
valuable. Not controlling these entities and relying on MailChimp to handle
them well is... well, quite a bet I would not want to take. Stories like the
one referenced are quite common and even though these are outliers I would not
like playing with these odds.

------
Gonzih
Mailchimp disabled my account the other day without any clealr explanation on
why. Seems to me like some automation went wrong on their side.

------
carterschonwald
after seeing this thread, I checked my idle but (paying for it for years)
mailchimp account which had some possibly value hundred or two hundred emails,
and it too seems to have been disabled this year... and I definitely have
invoices from mailchimp as recently as March 2018 .... :(

shitty way to handle a pure profit easy paying customer

------
iamleppert
Mailchimp is garbage. They are bad people working there. I wouldn't use it to
send e-mails to my dead cat.

------
adzicg
What’s missing in the context here really is whether he was a commercial
customer or not. If this was a commercial account, then this truly is
shameful. If it was a free account, then it’s just another story of
unjustified internet-age entitlement.

------
GCA10
Create back-up copies of any list, data, etc. that matters to you. I backed up
my Mailchimp list a couple months ago with exactly this scenario in mind. It's
a minor chore to do so. But it sure beats having years of data vanish.

------
m-arnold
I'm working on a backup tool [https://github.com/max-arnold/mailchimp-
backup](https://github.com/max-arnold/mailchimp-backup)

I expect to finish it within a week or so.

------
DKnoll
I had an issue with SendGrid where they deleted my client's account. The
account had been created by a person in South America (at one of their
offices) but with a Canadian corporate credit card. I guess they assumed it
was fraudulent and suspended the account without contacting us 2 days after we
had subscribed and already put the account into production. They had zero
phone support available, and the online support was inaccessible without an
account (even to dispute an account suspension, very 'Catch-22.') I had to
call their headquarters and leave voicemails on random mailboxes just to reach
somebody with the ability to review the account suspension.

------
xtracto
Same thing happened to me at a previous company. We moved to SendGrid and were
very happy with them.

------
bluepeter
ITT TIL MailChimp sucks.

------
eightturn
thank you for reminding me to backup my list...

------
throwaway7312
Our business was on MailChimp years ago.

We were on a paid tier. In 2012 we decided to try sending our own email via
arpReach + SES. Once we set this up we asked MailChimp how to pause our paid
account. We wanted to stop sending email and return to a free account until we
needed MailChimp again.

Their response was that there was no way to do that... I recall it being
something like "we do not like" or "do not allow" customers to return to free
accounts. You could either keep paying, or delete your account and everything
in it.

We'd already moved our MailChimp-collected emails over to arpReach (on our own
server). At that point, I just opted to delete our MailChimp account.

Everything was fine while we used them. But that strange incident left a
really bad taste in my mouth; it was one I never forgot.

~~~
dan_tyler
Yeah, MailChimp support is absolutely terrible. And it literally looks like
they don't care about it at this point. I stopped using them a few months back
and moved to SendX. The experience with their support team has been
phenomenal.

------
crushcrashcrush
Good luck with MailChimp. Their API has been broken for months, and completely
breaks their marketing automation/trigger tools. Zero help/support.

------
supergirl
hacker news is customer support?

~~~
josefresco
Hacker News is where you go, when customer support does not respond, or (in
this cased) responds so poorly you feel the need to tell the "tech world".
Besides Twitter, I'd say the best way to shame a tech company would be Hacker
News, given how many employees of said tech company and other influential
people frequent this forum.

------
paulpauper
IF this was a free plan, do not expect much help. if this is a paid plan,
totally unacceptable.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> I really don't like to resort to public shaming, but this really is
> unacceptable.

Public shaming works quite well on HN; I remember quite a few cases when the
problem was solved very quickly by hitting the front page.

However, in this case I'd give MailChimp more time. It seems the author
contacted them today. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation and they will
provide it tomorrow?

~~~
colinbartlett
There could also be some selection bias here. I always wonder how many other
attempts at public shaming never make it anywhere.

I've been locked out of my Amazon and AWS account for more than two weeks
despite numerous phone calls to Amazon support and desperate pleading on
social media. "We are still looking into this matter for you." I could post
some nasty blog post but I have really little faith it would get me anywhere.

~~~
cgriswald
I can't speak for using AWS, but Amazon customer support in general is awful.
Recently, my girlfriend was unable to get into her account. When she would
try, it would say she had the wrong password. When she would try to reset the
password, it would say the account didn't exist. When she gave up and just
tried to recreate the account it wouldn't let her because it said the account
already existed. During this process, she also accidentally created and gained
access to an account using an email address that belongs to someone else with
the same name.

She called Amazon support. The first person she talked to just told her to do
all the things she had already done. She humored them by repeating the steps.
She told the support person it wasn't working. The support person said she
couldn't be helped because she wouldn't do the steps. My girlfriend asked to
speak to someone else who could help her and the support person hung up on
her. She called back and had to talk to two other people before she finally
got someone who would help her. (Once she did, it was a process of about 30
seconds to resolve the problem!)

She received some gift cards from a couple of her clients and when she clicked
the link, it credited them to the wrong account (the one with the wrong
email). She had to call support again and although their solution was
ultimately quick and simple it took another 30 minutes of nonsense on the
phone to get there.

~~~
colinbartlett
My experience is similar since its with Amazon support and separate from AWS.
My account, encompassing everything covered my Amazon credentials, was put on
hold for "address verification" two weeks ago and handed to the "Accounts
Team". This means, no buying anything on Amazon for the holidays and zero
access to my AWS account, Lambdas, S3 buckets, etc. Just a mind-numbing cycle
of phone trees and "we are looking into this".

I cannot even sign into my Washington Post subscription. Thanks, Bezos!

------
deedubaya
I bet it sucks that the user didn't get a warning or notification...

...but as normal user of email, I appreciate a heavy hand when it comes to
email lists which mailchimp deems malicious or bad for its ecosystem. It's no
secret that mailchimp maintains a high standard for the quality of lists and
email it delivers. The common thread in these stories seems to be malicious
actors, poor/spammy content, etc. So I'm not sure it's so bad?

Has anyone with a "typical" (e-commerce shop, saas newsletter, etc) mailchimp
list been shutdown without notice?

~~~
sacado2
Well, OP's business seems pretty typical to me?

------
mayank_25may
I am appalled reading this!! How can someone keep your data hostage like this?
Especially (in this case) for no apparent mistake of yours! Really sad that a
company like MailChimp who knows (or should know) what an Email list really
means to a business would respond in such an irresponsible manner and deprive
you of your own data.

I run an email marketing company called - SendX
[https://www.sendx.io](https://www.sendx.io) and would be happy to help you in
whatever way possible to get you up and running with Email Marketing again.
Feel free to hit me up at mayank@sendx.io . Would personally ensure that our
team helps you out with this asap.

~~~
dan_tyler
Can personally vouch for the SendX team. I moved from MailChimp to SendX three
months back, and it's been absolutely great so far.

~~~
mattbeckman
And you made a brand new HN account 12 minutes after the parent. Thank you for
your personal and totally inconspicuous vouch. :P

------
mywacaday
You really need to give the service a reasonable amount of time to respond to
any ticket. Agree an account, paid or free, should not be deleted without
notification but you need to be reasonable and give people time to resolve
issues. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised.

Last week I had one of the best support experiences I've ever had with spotify
through twitter DMs. 100% my own fault where I had signed up twice by accident
by missing the "." in my email address and hadn't noticed I was being billed
twice/month for 10 months. A few questions over and back getting to the bottom
of the issue and it was resolved within an hour and my €100 refunded in 3
days.

Maybe I'm just feeling reasonable after my experience with spotify, if it was
my account deleted maybe I'd feel different or maybe its just the season of
goodwill :-)

~~~
aasasd
Out of technical curiosity, how did they resolve the situation of duplicate
accounts: just deleted one, or merged the data on them in some way?

~~~
mywacaday
They deleted the account without the "." as it had never really been used.

------
sfifs
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".

~~~
lisper
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.

~~~
CodeWriter23
It sounds like you afforded more notice to MailChimp than they did for you.

~~~
lisper
Just because someone is a dick to you doesn't mean that you should be a dick
back. Especially when you have no leverage.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Well, the only leverage he has is creating bad social media PR, and it seems
to be working pretty well.

