101–110 of 267 posts
We've had a similar experience. We use them for both marketing mass emails and for ingesting support ticket emails (I believe that's through Mandrill). Someone sent a marketing email they didn't like (they said another one of their customers complained about it, or something; literally one complaint) and so they silently shut off our incoming email. We noticed it when one of our customers called to ask why we hadn't…
I’m glad this got posted and I hope this gets resolved and MailChimp does the right thing (I’ve also upvoted the OP). But man, I don’t envy companies deep in the anti-spam/fraud business. The impression I’ve gotten is that when you act with a lighter touch and/or give lots of info about why an account was closed, spammers/fraudsters weaponize that and either figure out how to bypass your controls or social engineer y…
I think a good starting point is to take the existing process and add a more formal appeals process for people who feel their accounts were unjustly terminated.
It's kind of like prison. Everyone says they're innocent. Some guilty people might even sincerely believe they're innocent. But when everyone is saying they didn't do anything wrong it's really hard for the person who actually didn't do anything wrong to get "justice."
Unrelated, I would love it if a publication profiled a few spammers. I suspect they're very different from how most people imagine them.
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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…
Those numbers are not the 99.999% you quoted and you really shouldn't think they are. If you promised your customers five nines reliability based on the one-two nines of your free suppliers, that's somewhere between disingenuous naivete and fraud.
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Since we don't have a mind-reading machine, by that logic, we can conclude that no statement can be proven to be a lie. After all, how can we know what an alleged liar is really thinking?
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.
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 make a call to customer service. Is the front-line CS rep lying to me? No. But his employer is, by making him tell me a pile of bullshit about why my Internet is busted - again.
hacker news is customer support?
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 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.
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
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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…
I run my own smtpd for personal purposes, but if I were going to send outgoing customer-contact mails en masse, I certainly wouldn't do it through my personal perfectly-configured postfix system. Things like mailchimp fill a market niche.
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.
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It is still a lie. Also keep in mind the perspective and context that the end user has no way of knowing. And even if the data can be recovered in an unofficial manner whether they will actually bother is highly unlikely if they care as little as they most obviously do. So, as a user it is a pretty safe bet to just assume it is gone (but do keep poking).
It's a lie that organizations have backups? "Your data has been deleted" pretty much has always meant that it was deleted from the live servers and that the deletion will propagate through backups depending on the orgs retention policy/requirements.
No it doesn't. Deleted most places means deleted and gone forever. There are a number of legal requirements (in the U.S.) at least when dealing with certain government organizations, and many non ones as well surrounding this. Think of it this way, a customer comes and says, there is sensitive information on your server, and since we no longer want to do business with you, you are now required to delete it. Normally there is an end date to allow the backups to be purged through propagation etc., but at the end, when they say it's deleted, it means deleted from everywhere. Sometimes this also means completely wiping drives so there is absolutely no trace of it left.
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I deal with small business owners regularly. While this seems crazy, it's not even close to the worst we've seen. Entire businesses based on free email , entire businesses based on a social media following from one network, entire businesses based on an undocumented "black box" server that everyone is afraid to touch ... the list goes on. I routinely think about by my business model and the repercussions of losing ac…
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/
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.