Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails
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When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.
What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.
Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.
Or perhaps Google isn't becoming anything, it was always exactly this and people are only now waking up and looking past Google's PR. That tripe about Google being the champion of the open Internet was just good marketing that duped a lot of people. They're not a selfless group of Internet guardians and never were. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, who ever bought into their "Don't Be Evil" nonsense is a gullible mark.
More broadly, maybe this and other recent experiences might help shatter the idea that Silicon Valley and the giant tech companies are not the benevolent stewards of the global infrastructure that they paint themselves as.
For one thing I'll keep strongly objecting to the use of "censorship" for something as mundane as this. It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship. If you tag the walls of a McDonalds and you get thrown out it's not censorship. If you're using Mailchimp and they say "we don't want to deal with that anymore" it's not censorship. If they based their decision on race, sexual orientation or religion it might be discrimination but Bitcoin is not officially a religion yet.
For systems that have a quasi-monopoly or a very dominant position such as Youtube it's true that it can be a problem. Not being able to post your videos on Youtube will probably reduce visibility a lot. That's still not a free-speech issue though, it's a monopoly/lack of competition issue. The solution isn't to force Youtube to host your content, it's to work on having competition in the video hosting space.
In this case though it makes no sense. Email is an open infrastructure, anybody can start sending emails whenever they want. You don't have to ask anybody for permission, setup postfix on some dedicated server and mail away.
It absolutely is censorship. They may have every legal right to do it, but at the end of the day, they are restricting broad categories of speech, it's censorship, end of story.
Furthermore, "your own turf" never is and never has been a carte blanche to do anything you want - certain regulations and obligations, both moral and legal, kick in when you open a business to the public.
Which, obviously, it's not.
Not only are there infinite other mailing list companies out there, you don't even need one. You can just send emails yourself if you want.
If this were not a problem, Mailchimp and friends wouldn't have a reason to exist. The reason I call this censorship is because your options for large-quantity emailing are to sign up with a company like this (and subject yourself to their terms), or just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive.
The entire point of this move is part of their "dealing with antispam bullshit" service. What Mailchimp offers is not mail delivery. Anyone could provide that cheaply at near-unlimited scale. What they offer is the opportunity to piggyback on their good reputation as senders. Maintaining that reputation is necessary for the operation of the business.
> just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive
This isn't quite right. It's more that your messages will be rejected at the destination.
I go through my mail once every couple of days, and I've learned to recognize "refinance with us" or "sell your house" mail by sight and throw it away unopened. Now, if I see an envelope that says (for instance) "Internal Revenue Service", I'm going to open it up. That's because of the good reputation (in a certain sense) of the sender.
The mortgage people could slap "IRS" on their mail and have a lot more people open it and read it. They would also have a number of stern, suited people come by to discuss federal law with them. But that wouldn't be censorship. It's not censorship to withhold your endorsement of someone else's communications.
So, in a way, Mailchimp is actually in the business of getting around censorship in the form of spam filters?
That's where people should be directing their ire, those anti-free speech spam filters that prevent an honest businessperson from filling up their inbox with a multitude of "great offers".
Oppression in the first degree, that's what I call it...
Just because it's not as easy as using `<?php mail(); ?>` doesn't mean Mailchimp has some kind of monopoly that makes their acceptable use policy the same thing as censorship.
Sure, in the same sense we can be appalled by anything we want and boycott things for any or no reason.
There is no legal question here, but the moral question is far less clear cut.
Wikipedia is currently blocked in Turkey. That's censorship. Mailchimp won't let you use them to send emails about Bitcoin. That's a minor inconvenience.
The free market isn't of any help here either. Censorship is about stopping the spread of information and ideas. What's not known can't affect the free market.
If nobody wants to host your content then maybe the problem isn't them, maybe it's you. And if it's not then there's a business opportunity waiting for you right here.
Spamhaus in particular seems to have a reputation for unreasonable practices and rather unpleasant-to-deal-with people.
No, they're in fact limited by the contract they present when they offer you their service and relevant laws that may supercede parts of that contract. That would include some privacy laws.
>>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<<
Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp.
As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
I agree that as a private company they can do what they want, but I wonder if they're setting themselves a difficult precedent here.
https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
Every mail I receive that I didn't sign up for gets a spam report from me. With that in mind, every single ICO mail I've gotten has been spam.
>>not involved in the exchange of cryptocurrencies
... seems overkill. So any journalist who has actually transacted with Bitcoins is off the platform? That seems like mainly negative effects from the standpoint of "selecting for informed journalists".
"Sure, you can use our platform to talk about cryptocurrencies, as long as you're just one of those admire-from-a-distance types."
Ditto for production -- that would include e.g. anyone who's contributed code.
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.
This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
If it bothers anyone, they can use one of the many competitors or send the emails themselves.
What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.
There are no legitimate Nigerian prince emails. There are legitimate coin emails.
Blocking all coin topics like Facebook and ICO emails like MailChimp goes beyond “spam filtering” into big brother territory.
These companies are free to do as they please - and I’m going to boycot and avoid them. There is a line between “we’re helping!” and censorship and Silicon Valley is definitely crossing it.
And yea, I get it, you can’t possibly understand something that doesn’t directly effect you - yet. When something you consider good is censored maybe you’ll get the idea of acceptible precedent? “First they came for <x>” and all.
FWIW, I hate ICO and consider crypto commodities a waste in general; but I know “nudging” when I see it.
Depends on whether they’re doing it on the blockchain!
Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
A private company cannot censor.
Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so.
^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
Who knows, a lot of Mailchimp employees might even really like blockchain tech, or be intererested in ICOs, but at the end of the day, if serving ICO/blockchain mail results in lots of emails marked as spam, it puts their whole business at risk.
It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.
If n is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.
Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can damn well serve who they want.
And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.
Ultimately, this is first and foremost a policy decision around the extent of fraud in ICOs generally, and secondarily related to many ICOs' lack of adherence to Mailchimp's anti-spam standards.
On top of that it's hardly like Mailchimp has some sort of monopoly. There's dozens of ESPs and turnkey email platforms that will welcome blockchain business... they just don't have Mailchimp's inboxing rate.
The only way to make it a pure n% cost is to isolate the individual customer or all blockchain-email customers to a dedicated set of IPs/domains that can have their own (probably: really shitty) reputations. At that point, it's highly likely you'll go through all that effort just to take money from people and still not be able to deliver their email due to catastrophically low reputation infrastructure.
Refusing to accept the impact to your other customers of a hot spam topic is not "censorship". People really need to stop misusing this word. Mailchimp is a business, and has every right to take reasonable steps to protect their customers. It's already pretty common for porn and get-rich-quick businesses to be refused by these services, largely for the exact same reasons.
I completely understand banning ICO spams which at the end are just spams.
So a handful of criminals are ruining it for everybody else. Im not even talking about some of the ICOs being "scams", what clearly is the case and happens.
The ICO industry in general has shown its lack of respect for securities law (though there are exceptions); why would they adhere to a less well-regulated standard like opt-in for email?
The thing is, this is only incidentally about deliverability. Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure. But ICO related email is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of messages they send daily for non-crypto related businesses, and having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability. In addition, Gmail's smart enough to tell the difference between individual senders on Mailchimp's platform.
Mailchimp cares more about stopping email abuse (e.g., users sending spam to purchased lists) than they care about ensuring good deliverability. The two are closely related, but there are distinctions - the former is based on specific standards and policies, and enforced at a lower level than the latter.
I see this move as: considerations around widespread lack of opt-in standards for ICO related senders, plus concern over the level of fraud occurring in ICOs, and potential liability resulting from that.
Edit: reviewing some of the ICO spam I've received, about 30% of it has been obviously fraudulent/phishing - using lookalike Coinbase or Binance domains to try to trick people into sending tokens to a fraudster, for example.
Email delivery is a commodity business. Literally the only thing Mailchimp cares about is 1) deliverability and 2) price.
>> having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability
Why couldn't it? That seems like plenty to get flagged by Gmail and the like.
It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
- Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome.
- Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform.
- Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
Right, but it's feasible for any other company to build a product that delivers e-mail as effective as Mailchimp to the exact same audience. There isn't an implicit or explicit audience limitation in this case.
You're being ridiculous and disingenuous.
MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans?
This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard.
[1] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=e...
The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
Good!
They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.
In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool?
A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.
Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.
The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.
Winter came, and it was us.
The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams.
Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.
I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.
We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all.
Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.
I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform.
I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result.
[0] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...
If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out.
It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.
Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?
Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?
21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.
Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...
For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.
- A reasonable to use API
- A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider)
- Not painful to use
In my previous job, we were using MailChimp until they decided that for some reason some of the communication (the campaings that are created manually via their interface) with our clients was spam. They did not give us any warning but one day they blocked everything, including the API (mandrillapp), which our system was using to send email as part of our process.
We moved our mail lists to SendGrid while decoupling the API, using AWS SNS for that.
I hate companies that treat you as if they were doing you a favour (we were paying customers, and worse that they don't sit down and talk to understand what is the situation. No business sense at all.
From here, it may be possible to kick the bucket down the road a couple of times but basically I think it's game over.
I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.
Do we talk about Red black tree technology? Linked list technology? That sounds silly, doesn't it?
What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.
In other words - there's a high barrier to entry and you can't provide the service at all if you don't have a certain amount of volume to make a certain amount of profit to cover operating costs. Targeting a niche will not provide that volume.
Anyone with an email server can try, but given the nature of this particular community it is more likely that this competitor would soon find their email delivery rates hitting 0%.
Seems pretty rational to me...
As an aside, someone could easily set up an ICO to fund a competing business to take a big chunk of Mailchimp's user base -- assuming they weren't fraudsters, of course.
That's been well known since at least 1848...
Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?