Mailchimp is garbage. They are bad people working there. I wouldn't use it to send e-mails to my dead cat.
MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
241–250 of 267 posts
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#242Earlier 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…
Great point. I had a non-tech-savvy friend who “accidentally” got into spamming, and had no idea what he was doing was wrong or antisocial. He simply got hooked with one of those “make $$$ from home easy!!” scams where they send you a pre-baked spamming kit and convince you that you’re a businessman with an incredible opportunity. He came to me for help when he started getting banned everywhere and his emails stopped…
The best part is, when this guy votes, it counts as much as your vote and mine.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
As a manager of a customer service team, everyone on my team knows exactly whether something has been "totally wiped" or not, regardless of whether it's something that would require developer intervention to recover. To have your reps not understand this and ultimately mislead the customer (or, in this case, I suppose former customer would be more accurate) is a management/training problem, and what the rep ultimatel…
I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly because sometimes you don't want to set the expectation with a front-line representative that the data is recoverable. In many cases, you don't want reps promising to recover data that's potentially unrecoverable. It's one thing to recover data in the event of a mistake on behalf of the company but that should require a conversation with someone outside of front-line customer service. I've been in situations too many times where our front-line team knew when something had not been "totally wiped" and they turned out to be "totally wrong" because they were aware that we kept backups but not aware that we had a strict retention policy outside of a specific timeframe or, in other cases, where a hardware failure caused a loss of a specific set of data because it was marked for deletion and wasn't scheduled to have a backup anyways. The customer had cancelled their account and agreed to losing their data but didn't actually read the terms of the cancellation they agreed to and then returned over a month later asking for their data and a rep told them that it's not really lost because we keep backups every 30, 60, and 90 days. That part was true for live accounts but not for deleted accounts.
In other words, data recovery that can't be handled by the customer service reps and that requires developer intervention should be a "surprise and delight" sort of situation and not a "customer should expect this" type of situation.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager of a customer service team, everyone on my team knows exactly whether something has been "totally wiped" or not, regardless of whether it's something that would require developer intervention to recover. To have your reps not understand this and ultimately mislead the customer (or, in this case, I suppose former customer would be more accurate) is a management/training problem, and what the rep ultimatel…
Agreed, regardless of whether the rep can see it or not, they should be trained properly and reply that they no longer have access to the data, and that access would require an escalation of some sort. To simply say the data is gone is a straight up lie.
A lie is a falsehood that's meant to deceive someone. A rep saying the data is gone because, functionally, it is is not a lie. If the intent is to set proper expectations with a customer then I think telling them it's gone and potentially being able to say "actually, we were able to recover it by escalating it" is better than "we may be able to recover it by escalating the issue" because you're underpromising and overdelivering. The opposite just sets you and the customer for failure.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you suggesting that the delete command shouldn't be trusted because there might be a backup of the file somewhere?
You people are throwing around the word "lie" very loosely here...
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#246Reminds me of when MailChimp quadrupled Mandrill prices, with almost no notice. Severe disruption to our company; I had to pull engineers off key projects to migrate out email system. I'm not sure why people keep trusting them given their track record.
That incident still gets me angry. Migrating wasn't a horrible experience but they way they went about it demonstrated they couldn't be trusted with anything remotely mission-critical.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP here. To be clear, I did not violate their TOS. And deactivating an account for inactivity is not entirely unreasonable, especially a free account. What is unreasonable IMHO, and the reason I want to bring this to people's attention, is deactivating an account without a warning , without even a notification , and with no way to recover. That is a ticking time bomb that I was simply unaware of. I never even imagine…
Two landmines: 1. The MC one 2. Relying on any free service as an important part of your business. The adage "you get what you pay for" really does tend to hold true.
That's the big takeaway here, in my opinion. Regardless of the fault with MailChimp (and I do think they're at fault here), you should never rely on a free service if it's mission critical to your business and there should never be a single point of failure like this. If this really was as critical as OP claims it is, then they should have taken more care to ensure that this wasn't even possible.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager of a customer service team, everyone on my team knows exactly whether something has been "totally wiped" or not, regardless of whether it's something that would require developer intervention to recover. To have your reps not understand this and ultimately mislead the customer (or, in this case, I suppose former customer would be more accurate) is a management/training problem, and what the rep ultimatel…
I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly because sometimes you don't want to set the expectation with a front-line representative that the data is recoverable. In many cases, you don't want reps promising to recover data that's potentially unrecoverable. It's one thing to recover data in the event of a mistake on behalf of the company but that should require a conversation with someone outside of front-line custom…
Saying you know when you don't is a lie. Instructing people to say they know when they don't is instructing them to lie on your behalf.
The answer should be: "I can't know." Followed by one of: (1) Let me connect you to someone who can know (2) Let me tell you how much it costs to find out (or 3) Also we don't care.
That would be honest. Not saying it's easy.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly because sometimes you don't want to set the expectation with a front-line representative that the data is recoverable. In many cases, you don't want reps promising to recover data that's potentially unrecoverable. It's one thing to recover data in the event of a mistake on behalf of the company but that should require a conversation with someone outside of front-line custom…
Saying you know when you don't is a lie. Instructing people to say they know when they don't is instructing them to lie on your behalf. The answer should be: "I can't know." Followed by one of: (1) Let me connect you to someone who can know (2) Let me tell you how much it costs to find out (or 3) Also we don't care. That would be honest. Not saying it's easy.
>Saying you know when you don't is a lie. Instructing people to say they know when they don't is instructing them to lie on your behalf.
Because, in that case, the intent of the statement is to deceive. If the intent of the statement is simply to not set an expectation that can't be guaranteed rather than to intentionally deceive, then it's not a lie, in my opinion.
I work in audio editing and recovery/enhancement and there are situations on a regular basis where we tell customers that their audio can't be recovered. I don't think we're lying to customers in saying that despite the fact that, in some cases, we may be able to recover or enhance the audio to the point where it's usable if we invested an exorbitant amount of time on it. In the most literal sense, yes we can recover the audio but in the practical sense and, most importantly, to the customer we can't recover the audio in any meaningful way because they either can't afford the work necessary, we don't have the resources to devote to that work, or we can't guarantee that, even if we can recover it, it's acceptable for whatever purpose they need it for despite being "good enough" for us.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#250It boggles my mind why anyone would use MailChimp. The most important trait for a good organization is ethics. When they acquired Mandrill, they did the same to PAYING customers[1]. They even turned off comments on the blog post of the announcement. And ever since they did these shady things, they super-charged their SEO to hide any mention of this fiasco. If you do a quick Google search for "mailchimp mandrill" you…
They are very attractive to small businesses who don't even know Mandrill exists. Relatively well known brand, quirky marketing, good integration with other sites/apps, and free up to 2,000 subscribers (which many small businesses can only dream of!). It's relatively simple to make a decent looking email with their UI, even though I'm not a huge fan of it.
By the time you hit that 2,000 subscriber limit you're comfortable and stuck. I've used them before, my main issue (apart from price) is their poor automation/segmentation logic.