MailChimp deleted my account with no warning • Hacker News Board

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#21

Post by lisper » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #5

Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - no…

OP here. I waited several hours between contacting MC and posting the blog entry. This was (and still is) a time-sensitive mission-critical issue. I have customers I cannot contact about a potential security flaw in my product. Happily, I need to contact them to tell them that my product is NOT affected, but it could easily have been otherwise, and in the future it might be otherwise. This is an existential threat to my customers and my business. Damn right I'm not going to wait around.

FWIW, MC did respond, saying essentially that there is nothing they are willing to do, and that I need to create a new account. I have written them back asking if I will be able to access my old mailing list from my new account (obviously the answer to that is going to be "no" but I want to get it on the record). They have not responded.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#22

Post by slig » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

If you're looking for alternatives, I can't recommend MailWizz + Amazon SES enough. You can host it on a $5 VPS and you pay just what you consume from Amazon.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#23

Post by sfifs » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

acd10j wrote: post #15

sfifs wrote: post #5

Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - no…

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.

Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle...

Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like giving resolution a reasonable shot. If it were my business, I'd fire this poster as a client.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#24

Post by dhd415 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

I've also had friends who have had their MailChimp accounts deleted or locked without explanation, warning, or recourse, so I wouldn't rely on MC specifically for anything business-critical. That said, if you have business-critical data on any cloud provider, you should be exporting periodic backups of that data to another provider so you don't lose access to it all if a single provider shuts down your account.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#25

Post by raverbashing » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #5

Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism. It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - no…

So, besides blaming the victim your point is?

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#26

Post by nik736 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

What I don't understand is... when this data is oh so important, where is the backup?

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#27

Post by abc-xyz » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

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 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.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#28

Post by aasasd » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

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?

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#29

Post by lisper » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

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…

OP here. I did wait several hours, but this was (and still is) a security issue so it really couldn't wait.

Also, MC did eventually respond. They refused to reactivate my account.

Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

#30

Post by cgriswald » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 3:22 PM UTC

colinbartlett wrote: post #11

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #3

> I really don't like to resort to public shaming, but this really is unacceptable. Public shaming works quite well on HN; I remember quite a few cases when the problem was solved very quickly by hitting the front page. However, in this case I'd give MailChimp more time. It seems the author contacted them today. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation and they will provide it tomorrow?

There could also be some selection bias here. I always wonder how many other attempts at public shaming never make it anywhere. I've been locked out of my Amazon and AWS account for more than two weeks despite numerous phone calls to Amazon support and desperate pleading on social media. "We are still looking into this matter for you." I could post some nasty blog post but I have really little faith it would get me a…

I can't speak for using AWS, but Amazon customer support in general is awful. Recently, my girlfriend was unable to get into her account. When she would try, it would say she had the wrong password. When she would try to reset the password, it would say the account didn't exist. When she gave up and just tried to recreate the account it wouldn't let her because it said the account already existed. During this process, she also accidentally created and gained access to an account using an email address that belongs to someone else with the same name.

She called Amazon support. The first person she talked to just told her to do all the things she had already done. She humored them by repeating the steps. She told the support person it wasn't working. The support person said she couldn't be helped because she wouldn't do the steps. My girlfriend asked to speak to someone else who could help her and the support person hung up on her. She called back and had to talk to two other people before she finally got someone who would help her. (Once she did, it was a process of about 30 seconds to resolve the problem!)

She received some gift cards from a couple of her clients and when she clicked the link, it credited them to the wrong account (the one with the wrong email). She had to call support again and although their solution was ultimately quick and simple it took another 30 minutes of nonsense on the phone to get there.