Don’t worry! Here is a link to a step by step guide to reinitializing ICO and sending blockchain-related emails:
https://2no.co/1QyvB6
Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
111–120 of 143 posts
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#112When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to. When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair…
Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a br…
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.
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone. What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly…
Actually, not anyone with an email server can do it. That's literally MailChimp's value proposition - that they have servers that are trusted by the major email providers and so have high delivery rates. In order to compete with them, you must ensure that your servers are similarly trusted - the process by which this happens being an undocumented black box that is different for each email provider, which often involv…
They did all this legwork and a (small) proportion of their customer base is threatening their "value proposition" so they simply decide to not do business with them.
Seems pretty rational to me...
As an aside, someone could easily set up an ICO to fund a competing business to take a big chunk of Mailchimp's user base -- assuming they weren't fraudsters, of course.
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#114Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO or crypto?
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#115So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business.
21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#116When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to. When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair…
>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. You're being ridiculous and disingenuous. MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical produc…
And I would add that spam, in the US, is "perfectly legal". CAN-SPAM, even if it was aggressively enforced, effectively only requires marketing email to contain a valid postal address for the sender and a working unsubscribe link - it doesn't require opt-in.
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example, - Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than…
Mailchimp's business is specifically to get around spam filters. An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
> An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
Right, but it's feasible for any other company to build a product that delivers e-mail as effective as Mailchimp to the exact same audience. There isn't an implicit or explicit audience limitation in this case.
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#118Don’t worry! Here is a link to a step by step guide to reinitializing ICO and sending blockchain-related emails: https://2no.co/1QyvB6
Don't trust this, 2no.co is an IP logging service. See their website for reference. https://2no.co/
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could use a dedicated shard of their IP addresses for sending high risk emails.
But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP range. And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.
So charge more?
Re: Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could use a dedicated shard of their IP addresses for sending high risk emails.
But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP range. And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.
Mailchimp has offered dedicated IPs for years - the code and operational processes around that are already established. Gmail also rarely blocks at the IP level, especially for an established provider like Mailchimp.
Ultimately, this is first and foremost a policy decision around the extent of fraud in ICOs generally, and secondarily related to many ICOs' lack of adherence to Mailchimp's anti-spam standards.