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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.

Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.

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I gave tagged email addresses out to a couple ICOs a while back, and they have been repeatedly sold off and sent spam by completely unrelated companies (usually through Sendgrid, incidentally - though Sendgrid has been good at shutting them down for anti-spam policy violations after the fact).

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.

>> Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure.

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.

You might be surprised how specific Gmail's filtering ability is - inbox/spam delivery for an identical message can be different for each recipient, based on individual behavior towards similar messages. Gmail is more than capable of blocking an individual Mailchimp sender that's spamming while leaving the rest unaffected.

This is exactly what I assumed caused them to make this decision.

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.

Also, they could be held legally liable (or at least: party to a suit that suggests their legal liability) that they don't want—it's risk mitigation. But the question is: What of the other ostensible scams on their platform?

A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs us n% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at n% the usual price."

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.

Isn't the point that Mailchimp is concerned that association with blockchain/ICO scams will affect deliverability across their whole platform?

n might be large.

So if MailChimp said $1000000 per cryptocoin email, you would be content with this announcement, despite it being exactly the same thing in practice?

The problem is that the cost of Blockchain / ICO spam does not just fall on Mailchimp as a company, it falls on MailChimp's customers, who have to suffer through reduced email deliverability (for the same cost they are already paying).

Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can damn well serve who they want.

They could use a dedicated shard of their IP addresses for sending high risk emails.

But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP range.

And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.

So charge more?

SaaS businesses operate on volume - they don't make margin by offering custom engineering to anyone who asks for it.

Mailchimp has offered dedicated IPs for years - the code and operational processes around that are already established. Gmail also rarely blocks at the IP level, especially for an established provider like Mailchimp.

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.

It's common for businesses to turn away customer segments that could be antithetical to their ability to service the rest of their customers. For example, many credit card processors will turn down businesses with higher rates of fraud, like strip clubs. That keeps everyone elses fees lower and lets them operate a more efficient fraud department.

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.

Except it's not a pure cost thing. Delivering blockchain/ICO emails impacts the deliverability scores of everyone else routed through those same domains and IPs. It's incredibly difficult to pin that to a number, because it's hard to quantify in advance how much of an impact one customer's blockchain emails will have on your IP/domain reputation.

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.

It’s significantly easier to just shut down.

I'd guess that the spam filters probably go crazy because users actually mark this kind of email as spam. If so, this is the system working. People say something is spam, and less of that kind of email gets sent.

The most likely reason the spam filters go crazy because there is a huge amount of bona-fide ICO and blockchain related spam, and they can't tell the difference between that and emails that users actually want.

But the way we detect bona-fine spam is by user reports. We then train models / decide heuristics based on these reports, but in the end, users decide what they report.

They banned "Week in Ethereum" feed so you don't know if they are banning your email using the word "pepsico" because they found ICO in a simple search regexp or even Ethereum in different contexts.

I completely understand banning ICO spams which at the end are just spams.

i dont think its only that. there is also the aspect of being a target of tons of hackers trying to hack they way into ICOs accounts and gaining access to all users registered for ICOs and sending them mails trying to scam them to send the Ether to some other address. I saw it happening first hand.

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.

They could easily route riskier traffic over a separate set of ips and domains without affecting delivery of other domains. This is standard practice in the industry.

You might as well use a different provider than Mailchimp at that point.

But why spend that level of effort for a really low return?

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