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MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

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Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#231

Post by philip1209 »

protomyth wrote: post #99
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…

I wonder about how they detect cryptocurrencies and if every mailing list that deals with security is going to get tagged. Makes me wonder if any other words are problematic. I wonder if any historical societies use MailChimp to announce their lectures? Might be interesting to see if they got shutdown. Tumblr might not be the only ones having a bit of a problem in proper detection. Reminds me of the YouTubers who do…

I was apart of a finance student group in college. We used MailChimp to tell members about meetings. I remember our account got automatically flagged and locked once because newsletter contents included details about a forthcoming stock pitch presentation, and that apparently was close enough to a ToS violation that MailChimp froze us.

The funny thing was that our student group was allowed to directly invest a trivially small portion of the university's endowment in the stock market, so we were not soliciting others to buy stocks - the presentation was a confidential, internal one about how to invest our fund's own money.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#232

Post by artificial »

hobofan wrote: post #154

Been 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…

Did you ever consider SES? I've been using Sendgrid for about two years to handle lead distribution to client CRMs (Automotive). They have good documentation and are super easy to integrate. Although, I wish the delivery notification endpoint supported multiple webhooks.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#233

Post by skybrian »

vkou wrote: post #104
skybrian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You exaggerate, but actually, this is a good reason to avoid accusing people of lying unless you understand the situation pretty well. Honest mistakes do happen a lot.

It doesn't matter if the individual people at MailChimp were liars. What matters is that the institution as a whole - the way their policies and procedures come together - lied. The institution certainly knows of it's capabilities. It deliberately chose to not tell that to it's CS reps, because of a multitude of reasons, that come down to 'It makes our/their jobs easier.' My ISP, for example, lies to me every time I…

Well, but that's anthropomorphizing. Institutions don't really know things, people do. Getting stuff out of one person's head to all the people that could use it actually takes a lot of effort. (Look at how terrible medical record systems are.)

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#234

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

lisper wrote: post #193
beckler wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, but it's sad that this is basically the only way to get them to do it.

Indeed. Once the dust settles I plan to write up a detailed post-mortem. There's more to say.

If anyone from MailChimp is reading this: a postmortem from your side would be greatly appreciated too.

Currently, I assume the only thing such a postmortem would contain is "one of our anti-abuse system considered the account abusive, so our default process kicked in, some sort of escalation review process (automated or human) also flagged it as abusive, so no further escalation was allowed, and we don't really have a way to keep this from happening over and over again". (Which, to be fair, is probably true of any service that has to deal with abuse at scale.)

Anything better than that (e.g. providing notifications on takedowns, offering data take-out, or at least explaining why this isn't in place) is probably worth posting.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#235

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

lisper wrote: post #222
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you afforded more notice to MailChimp than they did for you.

Just because someone is a dick to you doesn't mean that you should be a dick back. Especially when you have no leverage.

Well, the only leverage he has is creating bad social media PR, and it seems to be working pretty well.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#236

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

ahje wrote: post #33
acd10j wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this: * Make sure to have a plan B for all service providers that you use for critical services. * Make sure you have a secondary copy of critical data, and that you store it responsibly in case a provider does something. That still doesn't excuse not informing the account holder, but given the short time that has passed, it is possible that task has ended up in someon…

If it ended up in someone's backlog, then MailChimp still screwed up because the "suspend account" button should automatically send a notification (even if it only said that more information will follow).

I'd also add one item to your list: Proper monitoring (which is extremely difficult and time-consuming to set up). A plan B is useful if you know that you need to enact it. Here, the third party provider had silently caused an outage, possibly because they consider shadow bans more effective without considering that the same thing that makes them effective makes them extremely damaging when they're handed out incorrectly.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#237

Post by teddyh »

unreal37 wrote: post #144
elliekelly wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My little sister works in customer support for a fairly large email marketing company that competes with MailChimp. From hearing her talk about some of her conversations with users booted from the platform I think a good number of spammers sincerely believe they have a legitimate business and are confused to hear they've been flagged for spam. A lot of these people seem to only know enough about the internet to be da…

Absolutely agree. Many spammers don't see how what they are doing is wrong. They run a LinkedIn scraper to collect 100,000 business emails for people in their industry and they want to email them. When you explain that they're spamming, they get offended. "No, this is not spam! These people are going to be interested in this product." They just don't understand why it's wrong.

Spam is That Which We Don't Do

https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/that-which-we-dont.html

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#238

Post by cwkoss »

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.

A company is liable for its agent's false statements.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#239

Post by garraeth »

1001101 wrote: post #139
garraeth wrote: post #90

A similar thing happened to me while using their Mandrill system. After years of using it with no issues, all of a sudden no emails were getting out. They shut us down without notice and without recourse. We were sending simple support emails, and auto-emails (when you register, forgot your password, etc). Absolutely would never recommend.

Did you continue to get billed for it?

Thankfully no.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#240

Post by AsyncAwait »

Spivak wrote: post #97
dhimes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant To whom? My mother? Nope- she thinks it's gone. So yeah- it's a lie, and you only catch it if you know better. "Yes Dad I did my homework" has pretty much always meant that he hasn't started it yet. No, it's a lie and the organization knows it. They are responsible for training their CS folks.

If I turn on Windows Backup on my Mom's laptop and she right clicks a file and selects "Delete" is the expected behavior that it be deleted in every backup as well?

If she doesn't know the backup's been set up, in her mind, yes.
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