MailChimp's Ban on Cryptocurrency Marketing Is Causing Collateral Damage

It's not an assumption, it's a core of e-mail marketing business. They can't really ask for consent to receive marketing e-mails, because they can't get much consent for this. So the whole thing relies on people being tricked into giving away e-mail addresses, unknowingly consenting to e-mail marketing, being lazy to fight unsubscribing bureaucracy, etc.

I have friends in sales in other businesses to who look at their entire job as being "buy Google ads, buy Facebook ads, buy email lists". The idea such a thing might not be ethical is absolutely foreign to them.

This is such a crappy practice for bootstrapping a new email marketing list, few things infuriate me as much as this. If nothing else, it instantly makes me never want to even look at your new product or service regardless of how good it might be.

That would be the easiest way to eliminate spam from MailChimp's platform. Also probably the quickest way to eliminate a vast majority of their paying customers.

I'm pretty sure these mail services already monitor unsubscribe rates and spam flags. But there will always be false positives, i. e. legitimate recipients flagging a newsletter because they no longer want to receive it, or because they forgot they agreed.

Spam recipients, on the other hand, may not report these messages often enough. Some just don't bother, others rely on their mail client or company's filters.

That could make it difficult to find a reliable cut-off separating legitimate and spam mail.

The only real solution to this would be for the mail services to handle opt-in procedures. That, however, would effectively lock you in to a single provider, because it'd be suicide to change providers and ask for confirmation from every recipient again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communi...

I feel your pain, but it's worth noting that email, by its very design, is intended to be open to receiving unsolicited messages. So frankly, by using email at all you have actually consented to receive unwanted emails from time to time.

I think it's unreasonable to expect MailChimp to maintain a ruthless approach to prevent people from doing something that can be done with any email client, sendmail, or any number of tools that use the open protocol of email.

Things are bad enough as it is with closed and segmented communications methods on the rise. I'm pretty happy that email exists the way that it does, and MailChimp strikes me as a company that really works hard to strike a balance between the competing needs of being useful for sending mass emails while being mindful of spam.

I signed up there with crypterium.io@mydomain. Some time after, I start getting blockchain-related spam to that address. I wonder how that happened!

When I pointed out on their Telegram channel that one of two things had happened, a) they sold me, b) they got hacked, I was threatened with a ban. Their fans thought I was a raving lunatic.

I now have a support ticket open. Surprisingly it isn't really going anywhere.

I no longer accept email at crypterium.io@mydomain...

See https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-ho...

They are paid on a lead basis. Average lead price is $5-$10. I don’t know many campaigns they run at a time, but I glanced at her laptop and it looked like at least 100 active campaigns.

There is big money in this as such people will pay to get investors.

I asked about her reason for travels. She was actually going to a conference for others in her field.

I'm sorry you've had issues with them. I hope you got a bad rep and they haven't become evil. When I used to do business with them I genuinely felt they wanted to do the right thing.

The practices these people are using are scummy as fuck.

The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell anything) you're still getting shut down.

I own small amounts of Bitcoin and Monero, I've been following the technology with interest for quite some time, and yet the whole "crypto" craze still seems like another alien world.

Why does this harms users who follow the guidelines to show origin/identity (SPF, DKIM, dedicated IP, etc.)? We also use SendGrid for transactional emails and it's the same: some hosts (like Office 365) have told us that they weight all messages coming from sendgrid.net to their users as SPAM because they've seen so many issues there.

I pointed out that they should be able to distinguish between spammers and those who, like us, are positively identifiable and have not engaged in SPAM. No avail.

Are they being lazy, or am I missing something?

1) Design decentralized service, with low barriers to entry

2) Jerks start using the service for bad things that make life miserable for the rest of the users.

3) To combat the spam, some service providers start creating whitelists of which other service providers they will talk to

4) People flock to those service providers, because they are the only ones that aren't flooded with spam.

5) Holdouts end up HAVING to switch to one of those providers because they are the only ones anyone talks to.

6) The service is no longer decentralized in practice

I don't know how we get around this problem. These people complaining about not being able to send cryptocurrency emails through mailchimp are complaining about the centralization of the service, but most end users are thinking, "I am really glad I dont have to deal with the spam they are trying to send me."

Most people WANT some barriers to entry for services, because without them, spammers will always win.

I think Mailchimp should have done this more tactfully, with a promise to deliver every legit coin newsletter email if the coin is actually in use for something other than speculation, a real use case, adopted and helping the world go round.

Where is the blockchain solution for spam, anyways? I have heard about some land registry in Africa that has moved onto the blockchain and I am ready to get my Kodak coins, fully bought in, expecting my Lamborghini to moon soon. But really, I am stumped when it comes to practical application for blockchain coin things. If I owned Mailchimp and was the benevolent dictator chimp in chief then I would freely deliver every legit coin email three times over if it could be proven to be legit rather than barely believable if you are on the Koolaid.

I figured it was just spam similar to what this thread refers to because I only ever get crypto-related emails from it. If it wasn't for the more-premium-than-most domain I'd have already auto-spammed it

Edit: Naturally seconds after asking I find an email from Angel List saying 21.co rebranded to earn.com.

As it turns out I'd been added or at some point had added myself to an "Airdrop" list, which is a list of people interested in cryptocoins. Removed myself from that and unchecked "Receive emails for tasks below your contact price?" should finally stop getting emails about dodgy new cryptocoins. Successful rubber duck debugging

I don't know who's to blame - whether Mailchimp has tracking up the wazoo enabled by default and people need to be knowledgeable to turn it off, or if businesses just can't help themselves when offered analytic features, but it's pretty crazy how Mailchimp hosts enough of the email's content in cross-site tracking domains that sanitizing them leaves the mailouts empty.

When an advertising push looks like this you know they're using Mailchimp: https://i.imgur.com/Yv2QCv2.png

That "view this email in your browser" link even brings up a similarly blank webpage! That link is already tracked, by clicking on it they already know I've looked at the email and care enough to want to see it properly, but the web version is still woven whole out of cross-site tracking shenanigans that it's filtered out (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking...).

So was our past. How does cryptocurrency upset the balance of power that has caused centralisation to occur?

There have been scam after scam with cryptocurrencies, and despite every player experimenting with the blockchain concept, few results.

Cryptocurrencies have a very real cultural problem they need to overcome. This is a response to that cultural problem.