
MailChimp's Ban on Cryptocurrency Marketing Is Causing Collateral Damage - exolymph
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/mailchimp-icos.html
======
patio11
Bingo Card Creator's MailChimp account got shut down once for gambling
content. I sent in a request to support with an explanation that there was no
gambling involved; the matter was resolved within a business day.

Running an email service provider is a rough business:

a) Emails hitting inboxes are basically indistinguishable from cash at scale,
and therefore you have all the fraud problems of a payments business but
without a lot of the built-in fraud resolution systems

b) There exists an oligopoly of inbox providers who have a Nuke Your Business
From Orbit button available to them, and that button can and will be pushed by
a cron job if you do not keep your customers squeaky clean

c) The customer population is frequently low-sophistication, like the owners
of flower shops or virtually anyone in the cryptocurrency economy (my
apologies to professional journalists like, err, Two Bit Idiot)

d) Per-account values are, at the low end, really, really low by the standards
of B2B SaaS, and as a result your customer service has to get operated in a
very scalable fashion, and that implies some tradeoffs where not everybody is
going to be happy with it 100% of the time.

~~~
robbiemitchell
Not enough people understand (b). Email providers have firm policies (i.e.,
robots) because they themselves are at the mercy of inbox provider robots.

~~~
davedx
Yeah, having worked on a medium scale web service that sent email before the
days of managed email list SaaS like MailChimp... I don't miss those days.

------
DyslexicAtheist
I receive cryptocurrency & ICO spam sent via mailchimp several times a week
and usually report it right away. Few weeks ago I called out the CEO of a
blockchain company and demanded to know how they got my email since clearly I
had no relation with them before. They admitted to have bought a list of
addresses from another party where my email was part of the dump. After
reporting this I still kept getting spam though. This morning another firm
spammed me via MailChimp and despite Mailchimp's claims that they've cracked
down on it no statement or apology from them, and I even got the impression
that they were looking at me like I'm somehow overly pedantic ... (I was
pretty pissed so my reply wasn't as friendly as it could have been):
[https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/98149715690437427...](https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/981497156904374272)

The basic problem seems to me MailChimp's assumption that people only upload
address lists from users they have consent from, when in reality everyone just
uploads their LinkedIn address books and hopes not too many will press the
"report" button. I am seriously fed up with Mailchimp not taking any actual
action against these users after I already told them that I don't consent to
receiving any messages about any topic from anybody via their platform.
MailChimp should add a feature IMO where if somebody uploads an email address
of people opting out that this person will be blacklisted from further using
MailChimp.

~~~
technion
The tech community has an incredible disconnect with the marketing community
here. We all assume buying dumps of email addresses is a bad thing, we all
hate it, we all think people are working with us to stamp out the practice.

I have friends in sales in other businesses to who look at their entire job as
being "buy Google ads, buy Facebook ads, buy email lists". The idea such a
thing might not be ethical is absolutely foreign to them.

~~~
joelrunyon
There's a huge difference between buying ads and straight up buying email
lists...

~~~
technion
I agree with you, but my whole point is that not everyone does.

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kneath
This is an extremely poorly written article. I'm glad most of the comments
seem to be ignoring the actual text in it.

What collateral damage is being done? It seems to me the opposite of
collateral damage is being done: Mailchimp has banned cryptocurrency-related
email lists, and those writing cryptocurrency-related emails have lost that
ability.

Beyond the absurdity of the title, email has always been decentralized. Anyone
with a server can send or receive email with whatever technology stack they so
wish. Of course, because there is no trust framework, there's no guarantee
that your email will get delivered… Which is why Mailchimp validated the
opposite of the article's conclusion: there is lots of value in centralizing
the management of email. They can act as a trusted authority to negotiate with
various email hosts and guarantee(-ish) to customers that the emails will get
delivered.

~~~
firasd
> What collateral damage is being done?

The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same
way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell
anything) you're still getting shut down.

~~~
kneath
All of the examples in the article (zeitgeist-style newsletters) fall very
clearly under a marketing umbrella by my judgement. They're the TV Guides of
cryptocurrency. Maybe they don't (all) have affiliate links, but advertising
is far beyond that line in 2018. If it's got the name of a specific currency
in any of the emails, it's marketing.

~~~
zodiac
> If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's
> marketing.

I think this is way too broad and leads to absurd conclusions. For instance
there's an MIT research group whose mailing list I subscribe to (not
mailchimp) and which would fall under marketing by your criteria. Papers with
specific cryptocurrency names occasionally appear in top CS conferences.

~~~
kneath
Yes, capitalism has infested every corner of our existence. Universities and
conferences are massive distributors of marketing materials. They are both
capitalistic enterprises.

It is very difficult to find non-marketing content in modern times. Especially
in America.

~~~
firasd
The whole business model of MailChimp is to get people to pay to send emails,
so obviously they are not averse to marketing per se. The reason people are
unhappy is that if I can send "MySQL news this week" updates to my
hypothetical subscribers on MailChimp, why can't I send "Ethereum news this
week"? Educational and informational materials are significantly different
from "Buy my token!11"

~~~
rspeer
If you're paying to send people "Ethereum news this week", it's because you
have a financial interest in promoting certain things that happen on Ethereum.
There are plenty of places you can discuss Ethereum without paying for it.

------
michaelbuckbee
ICOs and Cryptocurrencies aren't being singled out so much as categorized by
the behavior of the topic/community. MC has a long list of product categories
that they have empirically found to have deliverability issues so bad that
they harm all of their other users.

Escort and dating services

Pharmaceutical products

Work from home, make money online, and lead generation opportunities

Gambling services or products

Multi-level marketing

Affiliate marketing

Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities

List brokers or list rental services

Selling “Likes” or followers for a social media platform

Cryptocurrencies are just the latest. You can read the whole list and more
clarifications here (it's very clear and readable for legal documentation):
[https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/](https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/)

~~~
unclebucknasty
> _deliverability issues so bad that they harm all of their other users._

Why does this harms users who follow the guidelines to show origin/identity
(SPF, DKIM, dedicated IP, etc.)? We also use SendGrid for transactional emails
and it's the same: some hosts (like Office 365) have told us that they weight
all messages coming from sendgrid.net to their users as SPAM because they've
seen so many issues there.

I pointed out that they should be able to distinguish between spammers and
those who, like us, are positively identifiable and have not engaged in SPAM.
No avail.

Are they being lazy, or am I missing something?

~~~
jjoske
If the IP addresses get associated with to many spam reports, unsubscribes etc
the gmail etc will start to associate these IP addresses as bad, and will be
more likely to just block them no matter what the content.

~~~
gsich
Don't host emails where the IPs used have a high chance that they have been
used before. So no AWS/Azure/xyz stuff.

~~~
sudosteph
There are actually 3rd party services that mail companies can use to check how
trusted an IP is. So a lot of times, they'll provision an EIP on AWS, run a
check against that service, use it if it's clean, and release and try again if
it's not.

It does lock you to using EIPs though, which makes it a bit harder to scale
up.

~~~
Scoundreller
What's an EIP?

~~~
jffry
Elastic IP. You can reserve EIPs from among Amazon's pool and allocate them to
other AWS resources that need public-facing IPs (like an EC2 machine).

------
kristianc
> On the other hand, MailChimp's decision validates the whole decentralization
> value proposition that drives cryptocurrencies. Sure, there are other email
> newsletter platforms. Upstart Substack, which is sort of like Patreon for
> email newsletters, reached out to at least one unhappy former MailChimp
> customer.

And this kind of gets to the nub of it. Centralization brings massive
economies of scale, and allows you to free ride off the deliverability of
other newsletters that don't come anywhere near talking about potentially
fraudulent activity. But you have to play by their rules and you're at the
mercy of one day being no longer welcome, even if you've paid them thousands
of dollars before.

Of course, you're welcome to go off and run your own server / roll your own
email protocol / used a 'decentralized' platform or Gab or Voat or whatever,
but often a) these things end up being a lot less decentralized than you
think, and b) good luck getting anyone to know, care about, or trust you.

~~~
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Email is especially funny as you can literally send email from any internet
connected device, but the default assumption is that emails from new devices
are just spam.

~~~
user5994461
That is far from correct. Any device with DNS records will work just fine.

~~~
Cenk
As someone who has managed multiple email servers I can assure you that this
is not the case. You can do everything "correctly" and still be marked as spam
on GMail for no apparent reason.

~~~
blattimwind
That was clearly your fault, because your IP lives in a bad neighborhood.

~~~
Cenk
It is so much more complicated than that, the issues persisted for completely
separated servers even after multiple IP address changes. Running a small mail
server and all your email landing in your customers inboxes is something that
simply doesn’t happen like it used to.

~~~
simias
I run my own email server (for personal use, not corporate or anything) and
maybe I've been lucky with my IPs so far but I don't have a lot of issue
getting my emails through. Admittedly for personal email it might be a bit
easier because most of my recipients already have me in their address book
which probably helps getting through the filters.

------
jnnnthnn
When I read the article's title, I expected this story to be about other email
newsletter platforms being flooded with cryptocurrency mailers who were
previously using MailChimp, and how their own deliverability performance was
affected.

While I assume that what is described in the article might have happened with
other verticals, I would be curious to see how this will play out in the
larger emailing ecosystem given the current hype & aggressiveness of the
commercial practices of at least some of the players in the cryptocurrency
field (as attested by others here).

------
RobLach
What are they right about?

E-mail is already decentralized. Anyone can send and receive an e-mail with
only having network access as a barrier, and you only need a typical modern
computer to send millions of them.

Mailchimp's value proposition is that by becoming an authority over a chunk of
distribution using their brand, anything they send carries a badge of trust
since they promise it isn't malicious. Their e-mail templates are a nice
bonus, but I don't think that's the only reason some people use them. That
mailchimp origin server is a keycard through a bunch of gatekeepers propped up
as sentries against spam.

In essence e-mail is totally decentralized and trust is exchanged amongst
members of ad-hoc federation of parties with a vested interest of having non-
spam email get through the internet on both receiving and sending ends.

Is there a way a blockchain would make this market-based emergent system more
efficient?

------
donmatito
That's a problem earn.com could have solved, but unfortunately only ICO
promoters ended up using the platform, I think

~~~
corobo
Does anyone know if earn.com had another name prior to around November 2017?

I figured it was just spam similar to what this thread refers to because I
only ever get crypto-related emails from it. If it wasn't for the more-
premium-than-most domain I'd have already auto-spammed it

Edit: Naturally seconds after asking I find an email from Angel List saying
21.co rebranded to earn.com.

As it turns out I'd been added or at some point had added myself to an
"Airdrop" list, which is a list of people interested in cryptocoins. Removed
myself from that and unchecked "Receive emails for tasks below your contact
price?" should finally stop getting emails about dodgy new cryptocoins.
Successful rubber duck debugging

------
Animats
Mailchimp is a spamming service. They pretend not to be, but that's what they
really do. If Mailchimp was legit, they wouldn't have to work so hard to
conceal where they're sending from.

~~~
CookieMon
Not the only shady thing, by using Firefox with a webmail interface, all
Mailchimp's tracking is automatically removed, which means most businesses
these days send me their promotional announcements as a blank email.

I don't know who's to blame - whether Mailchimp has tracking up the wazoo
enabled by default and people need to be knowledgeable to turn it off, or if
businesses just can't help themselves when offered analytic features, but it's
pretty crazy how Mailchimp hosts enough of the email's content in cross-site
tracking domains that sanitizing them leaves the mailouts empty.

When an advertising push looks like this you know they're using Mailchimp:
[https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png](https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png)

That "view this email in your browser" link even brings up a similarly blank
webpage! That link is _already tracked_ , by clicking on it they already know
I've looked at the email and care enough to want to see it properly, but the
web version is still woven whole out of cross-site tracking shenanigans that
it's filtered out (e.g. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking_Protection)).

------
skookumchuck
Twitter is a better way to reach customers, because they specifically "opt-in"
by following a business. No complaints about spamming people.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Mail chimp campaigns are also opt in for the most part.

------
JohnJamesRambo
I remember when I was trying to advertise my websites in newspapers back in
the day and they "didn't allow advertisements for websites." This and all the
other crypto bans (Facebook ads, Google ads, etc.) remind me of that- old
regimes afraid of new better competition that aims to remove/replace them or
make them less relevant. The future will be decentralized.

~~~
JustAnotherPat
how is bitcoin going to replace facebook exactly?

~~~
unfunco
Where did you read this?

~~~
boffinism
I believe they're referring to:

"the other crypto bans (Facebook ads [...] etc.) remind me of [...] old
regimes afraid of [...] competition that aims to remove/replace them"

