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MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

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Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#171

Post by ams6110 »

ergothus wrote: post #140
LanceH wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

It's the main reason for corporate structure in the first place. To shield individuals from personal liability. CEO tell VP who tells Senior Manager who tells Department Manager who tells worker bee to do something. Everyone has an out. They either were "misunderstood" or they were "following instructions"

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#172

Post by imPndy »

the_dege wrote: post #17

The real problem is that support and service notification on the internet are often really bad. The giants can afford to do whatever they want without drawbacks. The really small players on the other hand can disappear without notice. Just the other day one of our VPSs went down, the web panel was also down, we discovered on twitter, posted by another user that the hosting company was closing in 4 days. They haven't…

did that host happen to be Hiformance? pretty much what you said is happening there (servers going down, no contact from host etc)

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#173

Post by lgleason »

I live in Atlanta where MailChimp is headquartered. Beyond their horrible customer service and stories I've heard from people who work there they are one of the worst tech community members in the city. There have been instances of managers from there Doxing people, trying to get code school students kicked out of their programs for respectfully expressing opinions in local community groups etc. that they disagree with.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#174

Post by carterschonwald »

after seeing this thread, I checked my idle but (paying for it for years) mailchimp account which had some possibly value hundred or two hundred emails, and it too seems to have been disabled this year... and I definitely have invoices from mailchimp as recently as March 2018 .... :(

shitty way to handle a pure profit easy paying customer

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#175

Post by mywacaday »

aasasd wrote: post #28
mywacaday wrote: post #18

You really need to give the service a reasonable amount of time to respond to any ticket. Agree an account, paid or free, should not be deleted without notification but you need to be reasonable and give people time to resolve issues. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised. Last week I had one of the best support experiences I've ever had with spotify through twitter DMs. 100% my own fault where I had signed up tw…

Out of technical curiosity, how did they resolve the situation of duplicate accounts: just deleted one, or merged the data on them in some way?

They deleted the account without the "." as it had never really been used.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#176

Post by nwellnhof »

ergothus wrote: post #140
LanceH wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

"Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility." -- The Cynic's Word Book (1906), by Ambrose Bierce

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#177

Post by cmorgan31 »

abc-xyz wrote: post #65
cmorgan31 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drives the assumption that their mailing lists would always be available to you even if they went out of business or that they are almost perfectly secure? Is it due to standards set by large companies or just an idealized desire?

Because I assume they use Google/Amazon cloud services which are designed for 99.99999999% durability, just as I assume they often make backups (it's not like it would be expensive for them to backup mailing lists every hour or so). If they went out of business then I would also assume they would give customers at least several months to export their mailing lists. Edit: for some reason I'm not allowed to post new co…

In response to your edit -

I think it's okay to extend your durability promise to your clients, but durability isn't the same metric as availability as you've eluded to in your edit. I typically tell customers our product's durability is an extension of AWS's via a BAA. If I had to shut down a product and needed to provide the data for export, it would be simple to throw them in AWS s3 by client ID and let them sit there, but you're going to have to budget a big chunk of money for it. The only way you get a green light to have that budget is if you are contractually bound to do it. I believe a lot of companies (mine included) do have those contractual obligations in place already, but I honestly don't think what I have in mind to meet the contract, and the user's expectations are aligned. Is it the raw data they passed via API that I return or the enriched data we produced that I return? If it's the latter, we're going to need more money as that will be exponentially more information to store for export.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#178

Post by rkeene2 »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #40
hippich wrote: post #13

To people mentioning public shaming. I had a mailing list with them removed with all contacts lost and account banned without even notifying me. Customer support indeed responded, but with something like your account was banned because you are involved into cryptocurrencies (i had hashcash.io - no selling or buying of crypto is even close) and we completely wiped all your data. Only after a hint about possible public…

> So they lied in the first response (all data is wiped and unrecoverable) Not defending Mailchimp, but keep in mind the perspective and context. To a customer support agent using some backend interface, it very well could be "completely wiped". To an escalation team, they may be able to pull it from backups in an "unofficial" manner.

The antecedent of "they" in the previous sentence is the company, not an individual. The individual creating the email, as a person, probably was not lying BUT since they were acting as an agent of the company, in an official capacity all of their actions were that of the company as a whole.

This shields them from individual liability as well as makes the company liable for their actions (as long as they are acting as agents of the company in an official capacity).

The customer has no business relationship with the individual customer support person, so whether they are lying or telling the truth is irrelevant to the customer -- they do have a business relationship with the company (a single actor, with multiple agents) and the company can easily tell lies via these agents.

If the above narrative is correct, the company did very likely tell a lie since the fact that the customer's data was recoverable was probably known by the company and also the company likely actively worked to make the opposite of this known via their agents.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#179

Post by pasbesoin »

LanceH wrote: post #94
cmiller1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie "A lie is a statement used intentionally for the purpose of deception" I don't think you can prove it was a lie.

The company is set up to deliver a lie, even if the last person telling it is doing so unintentionally.

Exactly. Corporate structures, governance, and regulation have been formulated to treat corporations as "persons".

Well, that "person" lied. Regardless of the specific agency it employed in doing so.

(And, this type of banning and cut-off from data is obviously -- just look at the comments here -- not a one-off scenario. I find it difficult to believe that the consequences, including the customer's lost access to their data, were not thought about by MailChimp, as an organization and by people in their official roles within MailChimp.)

P.S. As I've grown older and observed and thought about things, I've come to see this as a primary role of the corporation or other such entity: To "dilute" responsibility and accountability to the extent that no member -- or, no member who has sufficient influence, who "matters" -- is ever held personally accountable for their actions within and on behalf of the corporation. [Addendum: And, in turn, the corporation is never truly held accountable, because the employees involved "lacked knowledge". Nicely circular, eh? By the way, I don't consider paying a dollar amount that is often a fraction of the gains realized by the behavior, to be "being held accountable".]

I've stopped letting people in such corporate or institutional roles off the hook, just because "they didn't know". Or rather, I've stopped letting the corporations and institutions off the hook because employee X didn't know. All too often, it's set up precisely that way and on purpose.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#180

Post by sbov »

josefresco wrote: post #91
mkhalil wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to patronize someone trying to be self-sufficient. Just because you read blog posts titled "DON'T HOST YOUR OWN MAIL", doesn't mean you shouldn't. People are scared of hosting their own mail servers because they a) are told they shouldn't b) don't understand SMTP. I am all for decentralizing this hyper-centralized internet.

Sorry, I'm old enough to have come from the era of "DIY" mass emailing which transitioned (rightfully so) to using providers like Constant Contact/MailChimp. I've seen first hand the drawbacks of emailing thousands of people via your own SMTP server. Blacklists, legal threats, deliverability issues, proper unsubscribe, formatting etc. And this was early 00's when much of the legal framework around email marketing was…

We've been sending our email through our own servers since the early 00's. In my experience it's never been that bad if you are a good actor and follow best practices. Hell, even if you're a spammer and follow best practices you might still get through. But if you don't know what those are you will most likely go to the spam folder.

Regardless, hosting your own mail isn't the same thing as using outlook's BCC field.

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