Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I can no longer recommend MailChimp

grahamcluley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 150 posts

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#111

Post by rconti »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #63
rconti wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Are there actually any newsletters that you genuinely _want_ to receive? Personally I’d be really pleased if I could tell Gmail to simply ignore anything even remotely newsletter-related, as I would never voluntarily subscribe to one.

Yes. Just searching "mailchimp" alone in my gmail inbox, I see stuff from a couple of local wineries of which I'm a member, another winery which I used to buy a gift subscription for my mom, a distillery, a couple of local running groups I sometimes participate in, ... the list goes on.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#112

Post by natch »

dharmon wrote: 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…

By observing the behavior of Google’s spam filters (what lands in the spam folder and what doesn’t) you can clearly see that Google is not doing an effective job at applying generally to all users what it learns is deemed spam by some other users. Otherwise it wouldn’t flag its own Google News Alerts emails for example and many other legitimate emails as spam. So your efforts might not be having as great an effect as you think. But it should affect your own mailboxes at least, and maybe that’s enough.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#113

Post by civilian »

mook wrote: post #102
civilian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apologies, I'm a little confused. How would a transactional email put somebody into a mailing list so that they could be removed? Shouldn't they not be in the list in the first place?

The transactional email wasn't adding someone to a newsletter. But you can mark 'spam' on any email at all, and some people felt that our anniversary-of-them-signing-up emails or "you've had a problem being billed" emails were spam, so they hit the button. idk man! People are crazy.

We also had marketing emails through mailchimp, but they were totally separate systems.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#115

Post by snowwrestler »

kadfak wrote: post #22

I recently set up a mail server with DKIM, SPF, DMARC configured correctly. After spending a day fighting with major email services to not mark my emails as spam, I really saw the value of email service providers. But the damn prices... Are there any alternatives to traditional email that could potentially replace it in the near future?

If you are starting a new bulk mail service, you have to be very careful about the IP address. It can't be from a known suspicious IP range (e.g. any part of Amazon EC2). It can't be an IP that already has a bad reputation from a previous service running on it. It can't be an IP that is currently running a bunch of other services and sites.

Even then, you have to "warm up" the IP by slowly increasing the send volume from it, over about a month, while maintaining low spam scores.

It's a pain in the ass, which is why email service provider is a business model.

There are alternatives to email, like targeting and boosting social media posts. But generally speaking, they are all more expensive than email, even taking into account service provider fees.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#116

Post by snowwrestler »

jlgaddis wrote: post #47
stefan69 wrote: post #23

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…

> 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. Or, worded another way: the user really doesn't give a damn about your subscription. If they can't be bothered enough to take a few seconds to open one e-mail message and click on a single link, then whatever you're offering obviously isn't something that they actually wa…

As a non-marketer, you presumably have not had the experience of customers being mad at you because they thought they signed up for something but never got it.

Email marketing has got to be one of the top "HN readers are not like most people" subjects that get discussed here. Most people do not go through life in a defensive crouch about their email inbox. They sign up for things on a whim and then unsubscribe if they don't like it.

Double opt-in works well for some audiences but definitely not for all. And BTW it's been possible to operate Mailchimp as single opt-in via API calls for a while now.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#117

Post by x0ner »

Nerada wrote: post #10

Is this going to affect MailChimp's deliverability? It seems like it would, my understanding is the reason most relays and blacklists are so lenient with MailChimp is exactly because of their double opt-in policy. Looks like they're ultimately throwing their long-term business under the bus for a short burst of extra cash.

I'd assume so. More potential fake "subscribers" mean more bounced email and higher volumes which could be used as a early warning indicator for spam or reputation flagging. Slightly related, but I've noticed countless delivery issues with Mandrill, Mailchimp's transactional service. Their portal claims messages have been delivered, but many organizations relay back to us that their message never made it past the mail gateways.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#118

Post by make3 »

caf wrote: post #65
danielfoster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Here's the thing, though. As a user, if I start getting your mailing list emails because someone else decided to sign me up and there was no confirmation, I'm going to mark it as spam.

that never happens though

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#119

Post by civilian »

flukus wrote: post #77
BillinghamJ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that’s correct. Email senders are informed when you mark email as spam so they can add you to an unsubscribe list automatically.

Sounds like an easy way to verify active email addresses.

It is! But it's better just to check the SES queue for "email was delivered".

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#120

Post by JeanMarcS »

stefan69 wrote: post #29
ungzd wrote: 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

As I run my own mail server, what I do is always creating an alias, usually named after the website I subscribe. Like expedia@mydomain.com for example.

This way I can stop unwanted mail if unsubscribe does'nt work by deleting the alias.

It also help to see who is selling your email.

For example, some years ago, I had the problem with bitdefender, as I subscribed as a reseller (!). I explained what I thought about it to my sell representative, who couldn't find a decent explanation. And stop selling their product. And destroy the alias.

Post reply on HN