IF this was a free plan, do not expect much help. if this is a paid plan, totally unacceptable.
MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
51–60 of 267 posts
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#52We'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 replied to one of their support tickets. They didn't bother to tell us.
It's a big bag of "do not recommend".
(As for how we manage to use them for incoming email; emails go to a gsuite inbox, which forwards them to MC/Mandrill, when then calls a webhook to actually process the email further. Yes, we could do way better with our own SMTP server that cuts them out. I think this architecture was chosen to have a failsafe in the event that our services all go down.)
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#53What I don't understand is... when this data is oh so important, where is the backup?
Because not everyone using a mailing list service is technically capable of doing this, or understands why it's even necessary? I never used MailChimp but if I did then I would assume that the mailing lists I built with their service would be 99.999% secure, and that I'd always be able to access it even if they went out of business. Reading this thread with many users claiming similar experiences is quite frankly sho…
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?
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#54I’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.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#55Earlier 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.
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 givin…
Oh my god, so salty!
But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity.
This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels.
If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to " is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#56hacker news is customer support?
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#57I’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…
> Any thoughts on how a company should balance good service to users (and false positives) with the need to fight black hats?
Charge money.
A big part of why MailChimp responded this way is that they have a very generous free plan. With that they can't afford to dig deep on free plans that violate ToS. You'll get buried under the weight of support/vetting for that.
Once you start charging even a little bit, the amount of spam/fraud BS you have to deal with plummets.
Every hurdle your free plan introduces to blasting out emails adds friction for spammers. Give them enough friction and they'll move on somewhere else. Forcing them to provide a valid credit card before they can send emails is a great way to add that friction.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#58To 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.
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 ultimately said on behalf of the company was a lie as a result.
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#59What I don't understand is... when this data is oh so important, where is the backup?
There's an app for this - https://stompapp.xyz/
But Mailchimp really should be making it easy for you to make your own mail backups!
Re: MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
#60Earlier 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.
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.