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I can no longer recommend MailChimp

grahamcluley.com

51–60 of 150 posts

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#51
> And a small number of these people might think it's worth their effort to sign up my publicly-available email addresses to hundreds, no... thousands of legitimate newsletters and mailing lists that I have no interest in.

People do that to my email, too, but they call themselves "growth hackers".

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#52
post #20

That is not problem of Mailchimp, it's problem of culture and "best practices". It's really annoying and it became annoying long before this change. I receive lots of such emails not only from Mailchimp. At least Mailchimp has one-click unsubscribing, most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working. The problem with Mailchimp is: - Spam filters work mediocre, despite AI h…

> most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working Does this violate CAN-SPAM? https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... > You can’t ... make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request

CAN-SPAM only applies to promotional/marketing emails.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working Does this violate CAN-SPAM? https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... > You can’t ... make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request

Facebook themselves require you to log in to unsubscribe from emails. If you've disabled or deleted your account, you still get spammed daily, and there's quite literally zero way to unsubscribe.

If you’re on Gmail, you should mark it as spam, that’s what it is. You’ll also end up blocking that address.

If you run your own email server, black hole the Facebook.com domain.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#55
post #2

They haven't "gone bananas". Removing double opt-in means more subscribers, which means higher revenue for them. Their revenue is based on subscriber counts, no matter how they were obtained. I hope everyone else does what I do: any bulk emails I did not subscribe to get marked as spam in gmail. Even a company the size of mailchimp can't cycle and "warm" email servers fast enough if a critical mass of people are tagg…

As someone who gets a lot of newsletters from idiots who still think they own the GMail address I've had for 13 years, I'm always afraid marking things as Spam will hurt my experience more than the spammers -- eg, I'm worried it'll lower my account's spam threshold and cause more false positives in my spam folder (which i never, ever check.. and on the rare occasion I do, I occasionally notice I've been 'missing' a newsletter I should have been getting for years).

Any comments as to how this works? I've happily used the spam button on many occasions, but I'm always a little gunshy.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#56

As a marketer, one of the issues I run into is to subscribe someone, who filled a contact form on my website, to an email automation series (usually to nudge them towards taking an extra action while we scramble to get back to them). Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link. I do think double opt-in is the way forw…

I don't really understand the use case. Can you clarify?

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#58
post #2

They haven't "gone bananas". Removing double opt-in means more subscribers, which means higher revenue for them. Their revenue is based on subscriber counts, no matter how they were obtained. I hope everyone else does what I do: any bulk emails I did not subscribe to get marked as spam in gmail. Even a company the size of mailchimp can't cycle and "warm" email servers fast enough if a critical mass of people are tagg…

Yup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, but transactional emails), and AWS SimpleEmailService put us on probation. I got to write a worker task that would consume the queue of "someone marked you as spam" from SES and remove them from our email list.

Forgive the naivety, can you explain a little? From what I understand from this:

You sent emails from AWS to subscribers.

Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail.

You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details.

Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#59
post #32

From MailChimp's second post[1]: > More and more business owners are bringing up double opt-in. What they’ve been saying is that double opt-in is not an easy journey for their customers. Some go so far as to say that double opt-in is “broken.” I would go so far as to say if customers cannot be bothered clicking one confirmation link in an email, they didn't really care about your newsletters. [1] https://blog.mailchi…

I used Mailchimp to collect email addresses for an beta user waitlist in 2015. I eventually used a work-around to disable double opt-in because so many users had signed up, never clicked the confirmation email, and were then confused why they never received access to our product when others had.

As a user I also prefer single opt-in. If I sign up for something, I want to be signed up. Clicking confirmation links is an annoying extra step.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#60
post #20

That is not problem of Mailchimp, it's problem of culture and "best practices". It's really annoying and it became annoying long before this change. I receive lots of such emails not only from Mailchimp. At least Mailchimp has one-click unsubscribing, most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working. The problem with Mailchimp is: - Spam filters work mediocre, despite AI h…

One workaround is to use disposable email addresses when signing up to anything online, like https://forward.cat

Why not spamdecoy.net? It does the same thing and you never give your real email to anyone (though forward cat is open source so it's probably ok), and you don't have to set up anything before you use the temporary email.
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