
Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails - stoev
https://futurism.com/mailchimp-is-shutting-down-ico-and-blockchain-related-emails-and-people-are-freaking-out/
======
stoev
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.

~~~
spamizbad
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.

~~~
ISL
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.

~~~
kristianc
The problem is that the cost of Blockchain / ICO spam does not just fall on
Mailchimp as a company, it falls on MailChimp's customers, who have to suffer
through reduced email deliverability (for the same cost they are already
paying).

Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can
damn well serve who they want.

~~~
joshribakoff
They could use a dedicated shard of their IP addresses for sending high risk
emails.

~~~
kristianc
But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a
lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP
range.

And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing
emails to the correct IP shard.

~~~
Scoundreller
So charge more?

~~~
kristianc
SaaS businesses operate on volume - they don't make margin by offering custom
engineering to anyone who asks for it.

------
JamesLeonis
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
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.

------
notahacker
> 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.

------
CamelCaseName
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.

------
_asciiker_
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.

------
idontpost4389
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-
discriminat...](https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-
discriminated-against-gay-couple/)

------
logfromblammo
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.

------
creeble
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?

------
philipodonnell
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?

------
rdl
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.

------
kureikain
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...

------
hippich
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.

------
rargulati
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

~~~
patchfm
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

------
eco
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.

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

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

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

~~~
asdsa5325
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
never read a more irrelevant comment actually. no blockchain as a tech is not
the silly thing here.

------
nukeop
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
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
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
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%.

------
zitterbewegung
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?

~~~
jasonlotito
They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO
or crypto?

~~~
zitterbewegung
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.

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

~~~
tzahola
Forward-thinking?? They basically deliver spam on a large scale.

~~~
jessaustin
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.

