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Comment by dogas | Hacker News Reader

The article is missing deliverability stats. Sure, you can reduce your bill significantly by switching to SES, but that means nothing if all of your emails are being sent to a user's spam box or promos folder. Mailchimp does a lot out of the box to ensure deliverability and good email placement, and that's part of the cost you're paying for.

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Indeed. I used to work for another big mail sending service, and you would not believe the amount of effort that goes into maintaining good deliverability.

There was an entire team called "ISP relations" whose sole job was to work with big ISPs when one of our IPs get blacklisted.

There was another team that would interview customers after their sending passed a certain threshold to see if they were following best practices. They would ask questions like

* How did you collect your e-mail list? * Did your users give explicit approval to receive list e-mails? * Did you acquire this list indirectly, from another company/campaign? (big no-no).

Usually everything was fine, or the customer didn't know they were doing something wrong, and they corrected it. But not infrequently a customer (who pays a decent chunk of money/month) would be told they can no longer use the product. Besides it being the "right thing" to do, having recipients block or report spammy senders worsens the reputation of IP addresses.

An interesting exercise would be to calculate the number of man-hours put into maintaining the reputation of each IP address.

Yep. My networks refuse all mail from amazonses, as it is almost entirely spam and the abuse contact is completely unresponsive.

Mailchimp isn't spam-free but it stops the spammer hitting you straight away and has human follow-up for problem cases. If that increases the price of sending mail, so be it.

Amazon’s abuse system is automatic. At work we got a warning and then disabled after 15 minutes because people reported our emails as spam.

(Apparently notifying someone they are in debt counts as spam to some)

I'm curious - do you work for a debt collector? I ask because I've been sent to collections multiple times over medical bills, and every single time it has taken hours of effort to eventually reveal that all of the documentation given to the debt collector was erroneous. Mentally, I treat it as spam because I've learned that it's going to end up being someone else's mistake that the debt collector didn't look at carefully.

I would love to understand better how to deal with it - and if there's a fellow HN user who understand the debt collector business, I would like to talk to them :)

Always deal with debt collectors via snail mail, not phone calls or email.

Why?

Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206926 (Sep 2017, 276 comments)

>code4tee: The bit about calmly but methodically collecting a paper trail and then reading it back to them is excellent advice

Less high pressure tactics and them verbally abusing you, plus it provides a paper trail of wrongdoing if they violate any laws.

Snail mail is very hard to prove that correspondence happened. State law requires that I dispute their claims within 30 days via snail mail, which I did. They then have to provide documentation within 30 days via snail mail, which they didn't. They should be fined for that, but all I can prove is that I mailed them something within 30 days, and everything else is he-said-she-said. I prefer to tell them I'm recording the phone call. Unfortunately, my state's laws don't require they cooperate that way, and many just hang up immediately. It does stop the harassment, though.

The US postal service provides certified delivery. It requires a signature and proves delivery. You show your proof, and if they can't show theirs, you win in small claims. At least, that is the idea...

you should read patio11's recent post on dealing with this kind of thing. He's talking specifically about dealing with credit agencies, but the same paper trails are likely to be the standard way of dealing with any legal hassles. Also my understanding is that the burden of proof is on the creditor/collector to prove you owe something, so having a paper trail showing how you dealt with things in a timely manner is going to make you look better and avoids the he said she said problem.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-re...

FTC complaints works great too.

Nope. Just our client's customer's have "balances" which can be in debt.

Usually it's because one of our client's payment gateways is terrible and doesn't record all payments.

They probably feel like they didn't solicit that communication.

I don't think you should be surprised that people view debt collectors with massive disdain.

> Mailchimp isn't spam-free but it stops the spammer hitting you straight away and has human follow-up for problem cases. If that increases the price of sending mail, so be it.

Really? My attempts to get unsubscribed from a mailchip spam list were largely unsuccessful until I spammed as many mailchimp employees as I could find on LinkedIn. Mailchip offers zero support for those on the receiving end of their garbage.

I've always been able to get a response from replying to the initial response mail. Maybe I've just been lucky to have a different experience to you, but personally I've dealt with few more-responsive ESPs. (And obviously many, many total black holes—or what seems to be the new norm, automated systems completely unable to cope with deliberately malicious users and/or use of multiple accounts.)

Who do you mail when you get spam from mailchimp? I pasted the mail into their "abuse desk" form and got no response (but got continued spam from one of their users). I forwarded the message (headers intact) to abuse at mailchimp and rackspace. Nothing. Their reach a human forms are only for their spammers (err... customers).

Honestly, the most absurd part is that mailchimp is opt-out by default. I never once got any sort of "verify you'd like to receive messages from this sender" sort of e-mail address. Obviously mailchimp has no incentive to make their delivery opt-in because it would cut down on the number of messages delivered.

And, yes, you're right most of the alternatives are just as bad (e.g. Google, Sendgrid) from an end user point-of-view. I've had no regrets about blocking sendgrid and mailchimp.

Have you ever thought, "huh, my {confirmation, receipt, password change request, etc} email never got here" for this site or service you either use or tried to use? If so, they were likely a customer of an ESP you blocked.

Nope -- in terms of folks I do business with or have accounts with Marketo, Mailchimp, and Sendgrid are only used for marketing nonsense I don't want.

Self-hosting my mail stuff means I'd see if I were bouncing legit email pretty easily.

> Who do you mail when you get spam from mailchimp?

I normally use the link in the X-Report-Abuse header. I invariably get an automated reply immediately (so if this isn't happening for you something must be going wrong; this seems to have been introduced about a year ago).

This is followed by what appears to be a semi-automated response (it varies depending on outcome but the text is usually made up of mostly the same content). I've had human responses from replying to that. (Though there is rarely the need—the initial complaint seems consistently to remove the complaining address from the mailing list, so that campaign stops unless the spammer manually adds the address back. Why doesn't everyone do this? It seems pretty obvious.)

I've also blocked Sendgrid as, despite the occasional response from their abuse contacts, the campaign doesn't stop coming. (I can't get away with blocking Mailchimp in any case as I have users relying on legit mailing lists that use it.)

> the most absurd part is that mailchimp is opt-out by default

I think this is understandable in terms of customers wanting to move mailing lists from one ESP to another without having to re-opt-in every subscriber. I wish there were a better way to manage permissions for mail receipt, but the SMTP infrastructure is made largely of despair and tears.

That question was asked in the first comment of the article and the author posted a screenshot of stats from his latest campaign if you want to check that out.

The man hours saved each week alone made using the more expensive companies worth every penny.

I'm not saying a company is better just because they are more expensive, but I will argue you get what you pay for in this industry.

yep. switching from ses to sendgrid fixed a # of issues with false positive spam flaggings.

Curious, we switched from Sendgrid for that same reason. We were on the free plan, though.

Interesting. We definitely had the paid version. (The pro plan IIRC). We had a couple of isolated incidents of spam flags, but it was less than 1% of receivers.

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