ITT TIL MailChimp sucks.
MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
151–160 of 267 posts
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#152I can certainly sympathize with this. Over the past 20 years I've gotten bit several times by 3rd party email services shutting down with little or no notice and even had access to my email services sold to spammers by the providers I was paying for it.
The last time it happened I'd created a "Mandrill" account while developing an app and just a few weeks before releasing it I got a notice saying "Mandrill has been acquired by MailChimp" and I would need to create a new account with MailChimp.
That was last straw for me using 3rd Party email services. I spent the next several weeks setting up a "MAIB" (Mail-in-a-Box) server on a DigitalOcean VPS.
Setting up that server on DigitalOcean had it's own hurdles I didn't see coming, one of which was my MAIB server IP was black listed before I even sent an email because it was running on the DO platform. I contacted DOs support and all they could offer was "We recommend you don't use DO for email servers". Apparently spammers find it appealing to do this too so some email services, like AOL, Hotmail, etc block everything coming from DO and require you request to be whitelisted.
Because of that it ended up taking a few more months to reveal and deal with all the issues that popped up and that was painful too. It ended up being worth the effort though.
It's been working great for over 2 years now and there are some additional benefits I'd not expected when I first started working on it. One of the biggest is MAIB has a built-in DNS server too. I didn't use it at first but after playing with it a bit I ended up moving all my sites over to it and configuring my desktop Mac to use it first.
Given the chance the only thing I'd do different is to set up my own email server before I ran into this kind of "Mailchimp" problem again (because my experience is it will) so I could work through those issues first and transition to it from a 3rd party service at my leisure.
It's not an easy slog, but MAIB made it a hellava lot easier.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#153Not the first time this happened. Company needs to get sued a few times to learn its lesson. Just what needs to happen to PayPal as well.
A lawsuit that you wouldn't win.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#154Been there, done that. Two years ago Mailchimp deactivated our account without notice, and no explanation at first. This also impacted our transactional mails via Mandrill as the account was linked to the deactivated Mailchimp account.
Even after a lot of pleading they didn't reactivate it, and there responses were generally unhelpful and in hostile language.
In the end it turned out that appart from our paid(!) main account, an intern from the marketing department created another account some time ago which hadn't been in use for a few months already.
So in the end a coworker and me spent the night rewriting our transactional mailing to hook up Sendgrid instead, with no problems since then.
Fuck MailChimp + Mandrill!
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#155It appears to me, that everyone who advertises heavily on podcasts are crooks.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#156News flash: MailChimp just reinstated my account! Thank you, HN community, for your help.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I'm building a tool that automatically backs up your email subscribers and stores them in google sheets. It's still in dev, but feel free to subscribe https://stompapp.xyz/
> It will be your responsibility to keep it safe and you'd have to do it every fucking time if you want to update your data. You might want to consider removing "fucking" from your front page. I'm really not one to bat an eye at any form of cursing but seeing it on a company's webpage like that doesn't sit well. You have a good idea, let the tech speak for itself, no profanity needed.
Yes, gonna remove that! Thanks for the feedback :D
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#158Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope everyone already using or considering using MailChimp reads this. Denying access to your mailing list even if you violated their terms is insane. Banning accounts with no warning is already bad enough - ideally they'd just disable your ability to send emails until the issue was resolved, but at least I can accept that.. but to steal people's mailing list in the process? What the fuck.
For data you care about, you have backups. It's better than being angry later, regardless of whether you're angry at some company or at yourself (for not having backups). Backups also make your life longer, because of reduced stress. Otoh, you spend some of that extra time making backups, but it's still a win win, I guess. :D
Yep! Doing a monthly backup of my mailchimp newsletter, it's too important.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The company is set up to deliver a lie, even if the last person telling it is doing so unintentionally.
That's...fascinating. While we have lots of corporate personhood, I normally disregard blaming specific actions on a company because at the end of the day a person makes the call. But here you've pointed out that a company, operating as a collection of people, can "act" in ways that may be unintentional or may be deliberate, but are hard to pin down to a specific person. Definitely worth considering in more depth, th…
Does your tongue know when it's used to lie?