I can no longer recommend MailChimp
grahamcluley.com
grahamcluley.com
> More and more business owners are bringing up double opt-in. What they’ve been saying is that double opt-in is not an easy journey for their customers. Some go so far as to say that double opt-in is “broken.”
I would go so far as to say if customers cannot be bothered clicking one confirmation link in an email, they didn't really care about your newsletters.
[1] https://blog.mailchimp.com/why-single-opt-in-and-an-update-f...
As a user I also prefer single opt-in. If I sign up for something, I want to be signed up. Clicking confirmation links is an annoying extra step.
As a user, if I start getting your mailing list emails because someone else decided to sign me up and there was no confirmation, I'm going to mark it as spam.
It always amazes me the business that make unsubscribing difficult. That is the real way to get placed in spam.
I don't care if the unsubscribe links works or not, I already have a faster path.
Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop.
Here are the docs to see what info is available when sending through mailgun.
https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/api-events.html#...
They better not be complaining that their reputation is bad because I keep reporting their unconfirmed junk.
If clicking a link is too hard for you, tough.
Side note: Anyone who calls it double opt-in has a whiff of 'spammer' to them even if they're not. Confirmed opt-in is a more accurate term as without that confirmation click in the initial email, there's a chance the subscriber didn't sign themself up. There are quite a few 'email bomb' services that will sign a target email up for 1000s of 'single opt in' newsletters.
BTW, the German Wikipedia page lists the term, but the paragraph confuses me a little as it has it exactly backwards as was just mentioned:
"Das „Double-Opt-In-Verfahren“ ist vom „Confirmed Opt-in“ zu unterscheiden. Beim „Confirmed Opt-In“ wird an die eingetragene E-Mail eine Bestätigungs-Mail ohne Bestätigungslink geschickt. Der Verbraucher müsste dieser Mail widersprechen, um keine unerwünschte Werbung zu erhalten. Teilweise wird der Begriff von Spammern missbraucht. So nehmen manche Spammer in Anspruch, „Confirmed Opt-in“ zu betreiben, wenn ein neuer Empfänger eines Newsletter-Abonnements nach der Eintragung eine E-Mail zugeschickt bekommt, in der er auf das soeben getätigte Abonnement hingewiesen und davon in Kenntnis gesetzt wird, wie er das Abonnement wieder beenden kann."
(feel free to google translate the blurb, translation's ok)
I receive lots of such emails not only from Mailchimp. At least Mailchimp has one-click unsubscribing, most custom-built mailing list systems don't have it, requiring to log in or just not working.
The problem with Mailchimp is:
- Spam filters work mediocre, despite AI hype. I think they are still based on linear regression on bag of words or something like that. Instead Gmail blocks your server if it sends mail for the first time instead of being large company's server that already sent 1e100 emails.
- Mailchimp exploits this. You can't send email on your own and have to buy their service. It also spreads additional FUD that you must use it, otherwise all your mail goes to spam.
- Gmail treats Mailchimp as privileged sender so if I mark promotional emails from hottest startups as spam, new similar emails are not sent to spam folder.
- Hottest startups know this and subscribe you to all their mailing lists each time they got your email.
Curious about this - how can you have an 'open-source' service? I'm not compiling or running the software, and I have no idea what their software is actually doing because there's no way to verify that it's the same as what's been open-sourced...
This way I can stop unwanted mail if unsubscribe does'nt work by deleting the alias.
It also help to see who is selling your email.
For example, some years ago, I had the problem with bitdefender, as I subscribed as a reseller (!). I explained what I thought about it to my sell representative, who couldn't find a decent explanation. And stop selling their product. And destroy the alias.
Does this violate CAN-SPAM?
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
> You can’t ... make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request
If you run your own email server, black hole the Facebook.com domain.
Another one is 'Oh, wow, you've been getting some profile views!' that LinkedIn and other like to do. That's indirect promotion of their services. Couched as a reminder.
Today, after not logging into Facebook for a while, received an e-mail that someone commented on their profiles. Another of the same.
It can be argued that these is all a form of promotion, but this would take a less-business-friendly political climate to accomplish, if you ask me.
-- my former boss
Looks like they're ultimately throwing their long-term business under the bus for a short burst of extra cash.
If you use MailChimp and care about deliverability, I would recommend you begin looking at alternatives (if you haven't already).
Yes, most others have already switched to single opt-in.
> It's not all of the sudden worse than alternatives, right?
No, they aren't all of a sudden worse than the alternatives. They were already worse and they're certainly not going to improve as a result of this change.
I manage several e-mail servers and will be watching very closely -- even more so than usual -- the amount of spam coming from MailChimp. I usually start out by blacklisting individual IP addresses but if this becomes a big problem, I will simply blacklist them entirely and be done with it.
I've had two "incidents" in the last week or so with MailChimp that they have shown little interest in "fixing" (unrelated to this change) so I'm already inclined to do exactly that.
People do that to my email, too, but they call themselves "growth hackers".
Wow, I'm kinda surprised to hear that because I manage several e-mail servers (for thousands of users) and I am about as anti-spam as one can be. I'm certainly way more aggressive in spam filtering than most others I know.
I run my own RBLs (shared across several different systems); I have spamtraps and keep a handful of domains registered solely for that purpose; I do tarpitting; I will blacklist domains and IP addresses -- or ranges of addresses -- at the drop of a hat; and much more.
Until reading this thread today, I have never even heard the term "confirmed opt-in". "Double opt-in" is what I've always heard it referred to as and so that's what I've always called it. As I said, I'm about as opposite of a spammer as one can be.
You should be careful about making such broad generalizations or accusations.
I hope everyone else does what I do: any bulk emails I did not subscribe to get marked as spam in gmail. Even a company the size of mailchimp can't cycle and "warm" email servers fast enough if a critical mass of people are tagging unsolicited emails.
There's a somewhat longer answer about how MailChimp would need to make the company agree to a separate contract around liability issues, as per GDPR requirements.
In the world of carrier-grade email providers, they outsource spam scoring to one (or more) of a selection of about 3 vendors (Symantec, CloudMark come to mind). These systems also score against the sending domain, among a number of other factors. Source: my best friend is a lead engineer at a carrier-grade email provider.
And playing whack-a-mole with changing sending domains is ill advised as that will lose the benefit of any whitelisting occurring client side.
You sent emails from AWS to subscribers.
Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail.
You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details.
Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?
What should I be doing, to achieve silent spam disposal within Gmail?
I hope I don't have to set filters myself, that would defeat the entire purpose of a smart system that learns to recognise spam.
Edit: we're talking about "mark as spam", not "unsubscribe", right?
See this: https://lifehacker.com/5319723/gmail-offers-to-automatically...
This value will usually be an HTTP URL (it can also be a "mailto:"). That (unique) URL (which is tied to your e-mail address) is then followed in order to unsubscribe you from the list.
We also had marketing emails through mailchimp, but they were totally separate systems.
But then, I have no idea how you'd be correlate the transactional mail to the marketing mails anyway (I'd use separate addresses for that). If somebody added my address to a list I didn't sign up for, any mail from them would just be a reminder they did so... It wouldn't be hard to imagine somebody marking everything in the future as spam automatically after glancing at the sender name.
Any comments as to how this works? I've happily used the spam button on many occasions, but I'm always a little gunshy.
Personally I’d be really pleased if I could tell Gmail to simply ignore anything even remotely newsletter-related, as I would never voluntarily subscribe to one.
* 205.201.128.0/20
* 198.2.128.0/18
* 148.105.0.0/16
Those are the ranges you'll want to add to your blacklists.
In MailChimp's case, the only thing that greylisting would accomplish is delaying the amount of time I wait to get their spam^We-mails.
Curious why this isn't the default mode of operation:
- Business sends spam
- Gmail users mark spam as spam
- Gmail starts putting all emails from business as spam for all Gmail users
- Business fails
- New businesses don't send spam
You don't spam from mybiz.com
You spam from mybizmail.com, mybizmarketing.com, mybizoffers.com, etc.
They don't all do it, but many do.
And if they burn their main domain, it's an easy option.
Over the last 24 hours I've reported a half dozen accounts that have flooded our domains with fake statements and links to Mailchimp hosted .js malware downloads.
This has never been a problem before but right now it's out of control. Noone signed up for, what I'm assuming is, hacked newsletters on hacked mailchimp accounts, and suddenly anyone on any address list is now on the receiving end of this garbage.
So I don't know if this is such a dramatic change -- depends on how many people use the default forms instead of an integrated signup experience.
MailChimp's ability to be regarded as a non-spammy mailing list provider depends mainly on them weeding out customers who import lists of people who haven't expressed any interest to indiscriminately blast mailshots, not on requiring an additional step after an individual actually visits a website, types in an email and clicks a button sending a post request to the mailing list.
I don't think I've ever set foot in the 'Promotions' tab in my Gmail account, other than to delete everything in it.
In other cases, newsletters can serve as a sort of low-volume link aggregator. I'm subscribed to the http://elixirdose.com newsletter and end up with a few Elixir-related articles to read each month.
In other cases, it's just fun to follow regular company newsletters, because those companies are essentially soap operas in progress. The http://zenmagnets.com newsletter is 90% about their ongoing legal battle against the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
And, every once in a while, I appreciate getting informed that a product/service I've built something on top of—but which I'm not actively building on right now (i.e. I pay them money every month, but I never go to their website)—has new features, which might inspire me to build something else on them. I like getting announcement emails from {AWS, DigitalOcean, Twilio, etc.} for this reason.
I delete most of them after reading, act on maybe 1 in 4.
I'd be very surprised if my behavior here was atypical for consumer behavior.
I read Javascript/Node/goweekly.com newsletters in their email format. The Phaser.io newsletter is another. I think you're more the outlier than the norm.
For deliverability, which is pretty good on Mailchimp.
However I think that send emails out using the gmail API or the Amazon SES might be the way to go. Also depends on what you are doing, I think that those that over analyse the mail openings are getting it wrong, focusing on the wrong metrics. You should be focused on the sales metrics not be navel gazing in newsletter software. Content is king, get that right and again, focus on that, not the analytics.
Are you serious? Sending an email is really easy. Actually having the remote deliver it to the remote mailbox is the problem.
Edit: and API Keys are the recommended way to interact with SendGrid APIs
I've been recommending Postmark for transactional email and one of the others for newsletters.
http://mailchi.mp/5fbac34cf976/were-making-important-changes...
Wow.
https://mailchimp.com/contact/
Click “legal & privacy questions”, then “access our contact form”
However, if we've lost that battle, it would be nice if they gave a user the option to require double opt-in on their email before being added to a new MailChimp list.
"Business isn't charity" -- maybe it should be. At the least we'd get more service-oriented folks in charge, instead of the current crop of profiteering assholes that infest these lands.
As the article states, in places like Germany, double opt-in (or an equivalent) is mandated by the application of German (or even EU?) law.
If they had really gone through, they would have put their German users into a legally vulnerable position.
The rudeness of meddling with customers' settings notwithstanding, this kind of lapse is inexcusable from a company specialising in mailinglist delivery.
Are there any alternatives to traditional email that could potentially replace it in the near future?
Even then, you have to "warm up" the IP by slowly increasing the send volume from it, over about a month, while maintaining low spam scores.
It's a pain in the ass, which is why email service provider is a business model.
There are alternatives to email, like targeting and boosting social media posts. But generally speaking, they are all more expensive than email, even taking into account service provider fees.
I'll be leaving MailChimp because the cost outstrips the value as our list has grown.
[subtitle: it's like sending spam in Glaswegian]
Changing the settings for my own mailing list (which of course, I did) isn't actually a solution. Sure, it stops toerags using my newsletter as an email bomb but it doesn't stop many more MailChimp-run mailing lists switching to a system that will increase the amount of unwanted emails flying around the internet.
I do think double opt-in is the way forward (as outlaid in the article), but having that single opt-in option for some special cases is necessary from a business point-of-view.
Overall, pretty good compromise by Mailchimp.
Previously users entered their email just once, and had to confirm newsletter subscription via email. They didn't need to fill in a second form or anything, just confirm they wanted to sign up by clicking a link on an email they get.
Or, worded another way: the user really doesn't give a damn about your subscription.
If they can't be bothered enough to take a few seconds to open one e-mail message and click on a single link, then whatever you're offering obviously isn't something that they actually want.
As a non-marketer, it seems to me that marketers would want something like double opt-in -- just so that you can ensure that those on your list are people actually interested in $product. Or is it more about the quantity of users on your list and not the quality of those users?
Marketers want quantity; salespeople want quality.
It's because that's what each one is paid for -- and so companies end up paying too much for marketers to undercut their salesteams' effectiveness because they misaligned the incentives, pay for marketing they don't need (or even harms them!), and then sit there wondering why it's not translating into sales (or worse, saturates salespeople with duds and costs sales).
I used work in marketing and my (slightly exaggerated) opinion is you should fire everyone on your marketing team, hire more salespeople, a socialmedia person, and maybe a single dedicated person to track overall sales performance.
But what's the point of marketing? You should be selling from that first contact -- and if you have two teams doing the same job with differing incentive structures, no wonder your organization is inefficient and pulling at different goals.
Email marketing has got to be one of the top "HN readers are not like most people" subjects that get discussed here. Most people do not go through life in a defensive crouch about their email inbox. They sign up for things on a whim and then unsubscribe if they don't like it.
Double opt-in works well for some audiences but definitely not for all. And BTW it's been possible to operate Mailchimp as single opt-in via API calls for a while now.
Yea, the customers never got it because 10 other people on your domain reported it as spam and the whole thing gets black flagged on the server and dropped at the SMTP connector.
This entire thread says one thing.
"Marketing emails are dead, Mailchimp is trying to boost their numbers so they can sell before everyone else realizes it"