I gave tagged email addresses out to a couple ICOs a while back, and they have been repeatedly sold off and sent spam by completely unrelated companies (usually through Sendgrid, incidentally - though Sendgrid has been good at shutting them down for anti-spam policy violations after the fact).
The ICO industry in general has shown its lack of respect for securities law (though there are exceptions); why would they adhere to a less well-regulated standard like opt-in for email?
The thing is, this is only incidentally about deliverability. Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure. But ICO related email is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of messages they send daily for non-crypto related businesses, and having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability. In addition, Gmail's smart enough to tell the difference between individual senders on Mailchimp's platform.
Mailchimp cares more about stopping email abuse (e.g., users sending spam to purchased lists) than they care about ensuring good deliverability. The two are closely related, but there are distinctions - the former is based on specific standards and policies, and enforced at a lower level than the latter.
I see this move as: considerations around widespread lack of opt-in standards for ICO related senders, plus concern over the level of fraud occurring in ICOs, and potential liability resulting from that.
Edit: reviewing some of the ICO spam I've received, about 30% of it has been obviously fraudulent/phishing - using lookalike Coinbase or Binance domains to try to trick people into sending tokens to a fraudster, for example.
You might be surprised how specific Gmail's filtering ability is - inbox/spam delivery for an identical message can be different for each recipient, based on individual behavior towards similar messages. Gmail is more than capable of blocking an individual Mailchimp sender that's spamming while leaving the rest unaffected.
The ICO industry in general has shown its lack of respect for securities law (though there are exceptions); why would they adhere to a less well-regulated standard like opt-in for email?
The thing is, this is only incidentally about deliverability. Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure. But ICO related email is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of messages they send daily for non-crypto related businesses, and having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability. In addition, Gmail's smart enough to tell the difference between individual senders on Mailchimp's platform.
Mailchimp cares more about stopping email abuse (e.g., users sending spam to purchased lists) than they care about ensuring good deliverability. The two are closely related, but there are distinctions - the former is based on specific standards and policies, and enforced at a lower level than the latter.
I see this move as: considerations around widespread lack of opt-in standards for ICO related senders, plus concern over the level of fraud occurring in ICOs, and potential liability resulting from that.
Edit: reviewing some of the ICO spam I've received, about 30% of it has been obviously fraudulent/phishing - using lookalike Coinbase or Binance domains to try to trick people into sending tokens to a fraudster, for example.