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I can no longer recommend MailChimp

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Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#121

Post by jlgaddis »

austinjp wrote: post #58
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.

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?

The next time you get such an e-mail, look through the headers (available via "Show Original" in Gmail, IIRC) for a "List-Unsubscribe:" header.

This value will usually be an HTTP URL (it can also be a "mailto:"). That (unique) URL (which is tied to your e-mail address) is then followed in order to unsubscribe you from the list.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#122

Post by jlgaddis »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #82
shampster wrote: post #35

"double opt-in" is a term I'm used to hearing in a pejorative way from the pro-spam side. The anti-spam side calls it "confirmed opt-in" which I think is a more accurate description.

Anyone calling it 'double opt-in' has the whiff of being a spammer even if they aren't one. If you're not checking that the subscriber clicked the "yes I want this" link in the email, anyone can subscribe anyone they want to your mailing list. There are tons of 'email bomb' services that will 'subscribe' a target to 100s or 1000s of newsletters that don't confirm opt-ins.

> Anyone calling it 'double opt-in' has the whiff of being a spammer even if they aren't one.

Wow, I'm kinda surprised to hear that because I manage several e-mail servers (for thousands of users) and I am about as anti-spam as one can be. I'm certainly way more aggressive in spam filtering than most others I know.

I run my own RBLs (shared across several different systems); I have spamtraps and keep a handful of domains registered solely for that purpose; I do tarpitting; I will blacklist domains and IP addresses -- or ranges of addresses -- at the drop of a hat; and much more.

Until reading this thread today, I have never even heard the term "confirmed opt-in". "Double opt-in" is what I've always heard it referred to as and so that's what I've always called it. As I said, I'm about as opposite of a spammer as one can be.

You should be careful about making such broad generalizations or accusations.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#123

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

akcreek wrote: post #108
wlesieutre wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clicking an unsubscribe button on something I didn't subscribe to. I have no way of knowing if it will unsubscribe me or if it will tell the sender "Hey guys! This is a real email address! Send him more spam!"

Clicking unsubscribe isn't the only way to know if the email is good. If your email client loads images then it will be known if you opened the email which will also give your IP, geolocation, device type, client name, user agent, etc. Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop. Here are the docs to see what info…

Most clients don't load images by default. The big providers (gmail and the like) certainly don't.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#124

Post by JohnTHaller »

jlgaddis wrote: post #122
JohnTHaller wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone calling it 'double opt-in' has the whiff of being a spammer even if they aren't one. If you're not checking that the subscriber clicked the "yes I want this" link in the email, anyone can subscribe anyone they want to your mailing list. There are tons of 'email bomb' services that will 'subscribe' a target to 100s or 1000s of newsletters that don't confirm opt-ins.

> Anyone calling it 'double opt-in' has the whiff of being a spammer even if they aren't one. Wow, I'm kinda surprised to hear that because I manage several e-mail servers (for thousands of users) and I am about as anti-spam as one can be. I'm certainly way more aggressive in spam filtering than most others I know. I run my own RBLs (shared across several different systems); I have spamtraps and keep a handful of dom…

Years ago, email marketing companies schemed to use the phrase 'double opt-in' to make the process seem more onerous ('ugh, double the work is so unnecessary, right?') even though the original term was 'confirmed opt in' or 'verified opt in'. That original terminology was specifically chosen because without it, there's no way to know if the email address typed into that online form was someone legitimately signing up or not. Especially when email bombing was much more popular 15 years ago. Sadly, many folks only know the 'double' term these days. 'Double' is more commonly used today since email marketing firms do most of the talking about it. For instance, "confirmed opt in" has 92k results in Google while "double opt in" has 438k. It's much the same as the way the gambling industry rebranded themselves as the 'gaming' industry. Although in the case of 'double opt in' it's been more successful.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#125

Post by akcreek »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #123
akcreek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicking unsubscribe isn't the only way to know if the email is good. If your email client loads images then it will be known if you opened the email which will also give your IP, geolocation, device type, client name, user agent, etc. Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop. Here are the docs to see what info…

Most clients don't load images by default. The big providers (gmail and the like) certainly don't.

That's what I've always heard and I can only speak to my personal experience on this, but we track open rates on our marketing emails and have a 36% open rate historically. I'm sure this isn't everyone who is opening them as some percentage have images disabled, but to me this says that a large percentage of our clients do have images enabled as I doubt our actual open rate is tremendously higher than what we are seeing reported.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#126

Post by JohnTHaller »

rconti wrote: post #106
JohnTHaller wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't confirmed opt-in, it's also possible your subscribers didn't even sign themselves up. Side note: Anyone who calls it double opt-in has a whiff of 'spammer' to them even if they're not. Confirmed opt-in is a more accurate term as without that confirmation click in the initial email, there's a chance the subscriber didn't sign themself up. There are quite a few 'email bomb' services that will sign a target…

I even use the term "double opt-in" when ranting at companies that don't use it. I guess I'll switch terms to confirmed opt in, but I'd never heard of it until today, so I'd be careful with that brush.

If you were around and doing legit email newsletters 15 years ago or doing antispam configurations, the term was 'confirmed opt in' or 'verified opt in'. Email marketing firms schemed to use 'double opt in' to make it seem more onerous and draw attention away from the fact that 'single opt in' meant 'unverified opt in' that was vulnerable to email bombing utilities. Sadly, as the email marketing firms do most of the talking about it these days, many people only know the term 'double opt in'. But for folks like me that were both advising legit businesses on email newsletters and working with ISPs to block spam, 'double opt in' always harkens back to the code spammers or spammer-adjacent folks used.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#127

Post by wdr1 »

I wish MailChimp (and others) would stick with double opt-in.

However, if we've lost that battle, it would be nice if they gave a user the option to require double opt-in on their email before being added to a new MailChimp list.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#128

Post by makeramen »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #71
makeramen wrote: post #25

Would be nice to have some sort of do-not-call list equivalent for email mailing lists, or at least something that forces double-opt-in on the receiving end. Too bad we're not MailChimp's customers so they could care less really.

Couldn’t care less?

Oh ok. Thanks.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#129

Post by mook »

civilian wrote: post #113
mook wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah. I'd have marked the former as spam too (it's an advertisement reminding the recipient you exist, not something in response to a transaction just committed / something they did), but the latter seems plenty safe.

But then, I have no idea how you'd be correlate the transactional mail to the marketing mails anyway (I'd use separate addresses for that). If somebody added my address to a list I didn't sign up for, any mail from them would just be a reminder they did so... It wouldn't be hard to imagine somebody marking everything in the future as spam automatically after glancing at the sender name.

Re: I can no longer recommend MailChimp

#130

Post by Flimm »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #123
akcreek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicking unsubscribe isn't the only way to know if the email is good. If your email client loads images then it will be known if you opened the email which will also give your IP, geolocation, device type, client name, user agent, etc. Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop. Here are the docs to see what info…

Most clients don't load images by default. The big providers (gmail and the like) certainly don't.

With Gmail's web interface, it's more complicated than that. Images are loaded by default, but only through a proxy: Google's servers go fetch the image for you and then serve you the image. They only do this once you open the email. So you do leak whether you opened the email, but not your IP address, browser headers, etc. Here's a blog post from 2013 about it: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...
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