
MailChimp has blocked my newsletter. Help - darrenjsmith
MailChimp&#x27;s &#x27;abuse detection system’, Omnivore, highlighted my account and it’s since been reviewed by MailChimp&#x27;s compliance team. I can no longer send my weekly newsletter!<p>I’m working on www.pillowtalk.io where I collate links from across the web to help couples have a better sex life. I’m not a scammer or spammer and everyone one of my readers have double opted in. The newsletter isn’t full of links to porn sites.. We mostly link to a variety of blogs, Reddit, Youtube, Amazon and Love Honey.<p>The newsletter is about sex, but it doesn’t include explicit material. Every week I reference one sex toy, and to be fair their ToS forbids “Adult novelty items or references.”<p>Quite simply, Mail Chimp can totally do what they want, but their ToS hasn&#x27;t have been put into place because of someone like me… they’re there for spammers trying to hit hundreds of thousands of users with pornography or viagra links!!!<p>Has anyone negotiated with Mail Chimp after having been blocked before?
Does anyone here work at Mail Chimp and can enlighten me as to the process?<p>From your experience, will all hosted email systems have a problem with my newsletter?
If I have to move, would you recommend anyone specifically?<p>I’m a product guy and not an experienced developer. I’d prefer not to run my own mail server (yet..)<p>In the comments I’ll include the email they sent me along with a reply that I’m drafting. Does anyone have any improvements? ideas?<p>Really hope someone here can help!
Darren
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patio11
_Has anyone negotiated with Mail Chimp after having been blocked before?_

Yes. They blocked Bingo Card Creator back in the day, because of concerns that
it was gambling-related. I successfully appealed and convinced them that it
was not, in fact, gambling-related.

I'd send them approximately what you just posted. Emphasize that you are from
the clean, upstanding side of the Internet and, while you're aware that you
happen to abut a hive of scum and villainy, explain that you are _squeaky_
clean. Offer to stop referencing marital aids. If you have external indicia of
credibility, I would reference them. ("As cited on 20/20." "Written by a PhD
in human sexuality.", etc)

Ultimately, if you can convince a rep at MailChimp, you win. As an anti-spam
researcher in a past life, I want to mention the possibility that you're going
to lose, even if they trust your intentions. You're a negligible percentage of
the email and business originating at a MailChimp IP. It is critically
important to them that that IP and the email/business going through it does
not get burned. Various automatic and manual processes do not consider your
business to be of equal worth with other businesses, and your opinion on that
being unfair will not change their mind.

Additionally, and this is just a "facts about the world" thing rather than
meant to discourage you as someone making things: "I collate links from across
the web" is, virtually everywhere, not seen as a high value-added activity.
That goes for MailChimp, for Google, and for virtually anyone else you want to
convince to like you. It pattern-matches with "content scraper." I would
strongly consider investing in quality first-party "content" which you could
thicken with curated links rather than relying on the curated links being the
whole of the offering. You've already got two and a half strikes against you
due to the nature of the business.

~~~
darrenjsmith
Thanks Patio. Totally understand what you're saying. 'tis an unlikely outcome.

With regards to the 'collate links from across the web' \- I should maybe
reword this. Thanks for the feedback.

I should add, building a mailing list and delivering relevant content
(currently, 'collate links from across the web') has a 60-70% open rate and
40-50% click through. Already, I've proven I'm adding value based on quant and
qual research.

Having said that, a simple mailing list isn't the future of Pillow Talk- a
crowdsourced sex tips platform, is. This is just the early stages.

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darrenjsmith
\----- Message From MailChimp \-----

Hello Darren,

As a bulk delivery service, a huge part of our job is providing great
deliverability for all our customers. ISPs and spam filters are becoming more
sensitive to certain types of keywords and content.

Keeping this in mind, MailChimp is not able to serve as your email provider,
because the content associated with your industry conflicts with our
acceptable use policy. For direct questions regarding our acceptable use
policy and the types of content that aren’t supported, please visit our
Acceptable Use policy under Prohibited Content:
[http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use](http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use)

Nothing personal against your content or industry; there are just some very
strict spam filters and ISP rules that we have to comply with to maintain the
best possible sending environment. These filters are becoming increasingly
sensitive to certain keywords because some industries tend to generate greater
than average complaint rates (legit or not) with their emails. A risk that we
unfortunately cannot take.

We appreciate your understanding in this matter.

The account is open so that you may log in anytime to back up data. If you
have any questions related to billing, please contact billing@mailchimp.com.

All the best,

The MailChimp Compliance Team

~~~
jtfairbank
Thanks for following up with their reply. I appreciate you sharing, so the
rest of us can learn from your experience.

Maybe you can look into Sendgrid as an alternative?
[http://sendgrid.com/](http://sendgrid.com/)

Best of luck! Taylor

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jenmcewen
Oh man. Just from looking at the title, I had a feeling your might be in the
adult space. The same happened to me. We were using Mailchimp to send
technical newsletters to our registered developers.

I did try speaking with someone at Mailchimp to plead our case. Unfortunately
it didn't work. You might have some luck though because you're more in the
health & wellness area of the industry, whereas I own an adult app store, so
I'm 100% in the "porn" side of it.

There are some adult friendly newsletter services out there, but they're
usually very costly. I think I saw one a few years back that was $150 a month.
We've been using Amazon SES to send verification emails for new registrations,
so we opted for SES for our monthly dev newsletter, neither of which have any
porn or adult content in them whatsoever.

~~~
mithras
Isn't SES strictly for transactional emails?

~~~
jenmcewen
Nope, you can use it lots of other messaging, like marketing, newsletters, and
notifications.

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cyberpanther
In my experience MailChimp customer service is hard to deal with and they
don't really try to work with you even when you have a legitimate claim like
you have. Also MailChimp will not give you any specific information about why
you were shutdown other than just generic information.

I would suggestion just switching to another service. I've had better
experience with [https://mailgun.com/](https://mailgun.com/) because they will
try to work with you more. They also have more options so if your industry is
high risk, you can use your own IP addresses but still get the MailGun
service.

~~~
darrenjsmith
Thanks! That's the second mail gun recommendation I've had, but as a product
guy (not a dev) I was trying to stay away having to set this up! :)

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darrenjsmith
\----- Draft Email I am Crafting in Reply \-----

Hey MailChimper's!

Thanks for the clear communication in the MailChimp Compliance email I have
received. The ability to send email from my account has been blocked. I
regretfully understand as to why my account has been blocked thus far. Having
said that, I have a few questions.

Pillow Talk provide a weekly collection of links from across the web to
educate couples on how to have a better sex life. The majority of links I
include are from legitimate blogs, Reddit, YouTube, IMDB and Amazon.

We’re not a scammers or spammers and every recipient has has to double opt in
to receiving this email. I appreciate that your abuse prevention system
Omnivore, has highlighted ‘content, keywords or activity’ that 'indicate the
possibility of harmful information being sent through your service’ and I’d
love to understand exactly what we’re doing that is inappropriate?

I was attempting to send issue 8 of Pillow Talk last Friday 17th October. I
have used Mail Chimp for 7 weeks without any problems. Why now? What exactly
has caused Omnivore to highlight us?

Our email is clearly about sex, but we’re not sending thousands of emails
selling viagra pills or pornography! I understand why your ToS has been
written the way it is, but I can’t imagine it's for small educational mailing
lists like ours. I feel we have been bucketed with all the ‘bad guys’, but
clearly we’re trying to educate, not spam!

In the last issue, I did include a link to a porn site— for an educational
how-to video. I’m very happy not linking to porn sites if this is the issue?
Please could you confirm?

It’s a really unfortunate kick in the teeth. I’m at the beginning of building
a sexual education platform for the 21st century and already hitting
institutional roadblocks and rules which are there to stop the scammers and
spammers, not legitimate businesses trying to educate couples!

I please, please, kindly ask you to review your decision. I know you don’t
have to at all! But, for everyone suffering from boring sex in the long term
relationships, or for all the sexless marriages out there, this is a huge
problem for millions. We need to get better at talking and learning about sex
and at the moment the scammers, spammers and porn industry are winning because
they’re making it difficult for anyone legitimate to make things better! Can
you be part of helping stop that, please?

~~~
patio11
My rewrite (focused more on emphasizing your legitimacy and less on emoting
about MailChimp's policies):

\----

Hiya MailChimpers,

Pillow Talk, a curated newsletter to assist couples with romantic and sexual
aspects of their relationships, was recently blocked. I would like to request
that you reconsider.

I'm aware that adult-oriented businesses are historically considered high-risk
in email sending. Pillow Talk is not an adult-oriented business. We're an
educational resource which happens to discuss human sexuality. Our content is
not explicit and largely consists of links to reputable websites, such as
IMDB, Amazon, and [a blog maintained by a Harvard PhD in human sexuality would
be a really good thing to mention right now]. We _do not_ include or link to
obscene materials -- the raciest it gets would still pass muster at a Borders
in Kansas. [Patrick notes: If not true, apologize and fix.]

Previously, we have from time-to-time included affiliate links to marital
aids. On re-reading your TOS, I found that this was disallowed, so we will
stop doing so immediately.

I understand that MailChimp cannot afford to have elevated complaint rates
from flight-by-night operators in seedy sectors. We run a tight ship here,
with all emails collected in a proper double opt-in fashion. As you can verify
in our account, our complaint rate is [1 / 40,000 emails or whatever], which
is well-within industry norms.

Given that we're an upstanding educational publication and that MailChimp is
the best choice for permission-based email marketing, we're hoping to continue
using your service. If possible, please reconsider the suspension of our
account.

If you have any questions, I can be reached at 555 555-5555 or via email.

Regards,

$YOU

~~~
darrenjsmith
Patio, that reply is immense. Thank you for taking the time.

I will make a couple additions and send it off to them tomorrow! Will let you
know how it goes :)

Cheers

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jordsmi
I've had nothing but bad experiences with mailchimp.

Switch over to aweber, getresponse, etc.

~~~
darrenjsmith
Good shout! Thanks Jordsmi

