Intercom is a terrible Mailchimp. So is Mailchimp | Hacker News Reader

Intercom is a terrible Mailchimp. So is Mailchimp

github.com

36 pointsstickfigure35 comments

Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this surprised me:

> recipient list ... with their subscribe/unsubscribe status

> ...API lets us interrogate and twiddle a contact's subscribe/unsubscribe status. It can remain the master database.

I have assumed that when I unsubscribe from a mailing list my entry is deleted from the subscriber database. Apparently not.

If this is really the case this makes me want give up on trying to unsubscribe and instead just mark things as spam. Fuck these people.

Think about it. If they don’t keep your email that you unsubscribed then if it comes in through another data source or is reloaded then it’ll subscribe you again. Keeping track ensures they don’t do it accidentally or automatically. Or for exports/backups etc.

Yep, I maintain a few Mailchimp mailing lists for our nonprofit, I periodically reaggregate, import, pull in new data feeds, etc. and Mailchimp will maintain the unsubscribe list. If I reimport an email on accident that's already unsubscribed, I'd never want to accidentally re-email the person again.

Should you not want to only subscribe people who explicitly ask?

When I get unsolicited mail I definitely send it straight to trash, I don't even try to be nice.

People like us are outliers. Most people get notifications for every email they receive, and are used to getting emails from every business with which they transact.

You can be moving between different providers or accounts

What do you mean? If I change my email address, having the old one on file won't help keep me from getting spam at the new one.

How do you want unsubscribing to work!? If they don't keep your entry around, marked as unsubscribe, the next time your email address gets added to the list, you'll get subscribed again.

Keeping your address around prevents you from getting spammed. It's not some nefarious plot.

sending mail to a bunch of random people you got in a giant list you bought that have never associated with you is a nefarious plot

That seems like an excessively uncharitable interpretation.

What would be a more charitable interpretation? I'm open to pursuasion.

But I cannot imagine a case where it is legit to send an automatic message to someone who did not explicitly give permission to receive it.

Charitable interpretation 1: non-tech org with systems that integrate poorly, which they work around by shuffling around data dumps/Excel sheets periodically. This means that customers (who may have initially consented but unsubscribed later) could end up being dumped into whatever mailing list software repeatedly.

Charitable interpretation 2: list of consenting subscribers from a one-time campaign, but due to human error, someone ends up importing the same list again 3 months down the line.

Sounds like organizations that shouldn't have my personal data in the first place, since they don't have suitable processes to look after it.

That’s a higher hurdle; you just asked for a more charitable interpretation than ‘shady bought list of non-consenting recipients’, which I gave you.

Not really. Yours is just "bunch of people without the skill or concern to responsibly perform the task they promised.

Not only do I enjoy bein gthe victim of such people I wouldn't want to be their customer either, if that's their level of care.

If you don’t want to be their customer, that’s your own free choice, but it still doesn’t mean that they’re getting their email lists from illegitimate sources.

It does sound to me like a nefarious plot (but I'm making this comment in the interest of hearing an alternative explanation).

BTW I have carried a bag myself (lived on commission) from cold-calling up to closing large deals. So this isn't some "commerce is crap" / "I hate salespeople" knee-jerk bullshit. Shoveling turds into my inbox is gets you on, well, my shit list.

To me, sending me automatic mail I didn't ask for is being an outsider and adding to my todo list.* This is a hostile act, basically saying you do not value my time.

So when you tell me that you get a list of names and just add them to your spray-n-pray list, I can only consider that spammy activity. And when I think of it that way, maintaining a "don't harass these people again" list doesn't sound like a kindness, it sounds like you did it to avoid getting sued, i.e. for your benefit, not mine.

As I said, I'd be interested to learn if there is a more charitable way to look at it. Because the way it looks to me, it's all about you and you don't give a shit about the people who receive your messages.

* there is legit unsolicited mail, for example if my pal Alice tells Bob, "hey, you should ask gumby your question, here's his address". That's by definition personal and low volume.

Well, the other way to look at it is if you get your way, and you unsubscribe from a mailing list, you’ll eventually get added right back to it again. If that seems like your ideal state, then I guess you don’t really value your own time all that much.

Though as a middle ground it does seem like writing is on the wall for an additional checkbox like “unsubscribe and delete my mailing list record and mail preferences (your email may be retrieved again and get added back to the mailing list.)”

You've got a weird obsession with feces, and I'm not sure why you've made me into some spamlord sending out millions of emails to buy c1alis and v1agra. I'm approaching the problem from first principles, with an understanding that inside the black square on the Internet map where the spammers live, there are sloppy humans that pass around csv files, who don't talk to each other, which then get dumped into a machine that spits out emails.

How would you build such a machine? How would you make sure the machine doesn't do the wrong thing and send emails to people that have clicked the unsubscribe button? There are many humans swirling around, of varying technical competency and kindness and sanity levels. All it would take is for one of them, half drunk, to upload Dreamforce_emails_FINAL_1_(1).csv instead of Dreamforce_emails_FINAL_1_MINUS_GUMBY.csv into the machine for your email to reappear after you'd unsubscribed.

In the simplest terms, you can’t even adhere to various regulations (like CAN-SPAM) if you don’t retain who you’re supposed to suppress emails to.

Arguably this information should be stored encrypted, but I suspect that’s very rare.

If I try to resubscribe that's my business.

If you add people who aren't asking to subscribe that's the definition of spam (the "unsolicited" part of "UCE")

Unfortunately the world is nowhere near that simple. Big companies (and small companies that have been around for a while) accumulate multiple lists - they merge, they fork, they get transferred from one system to another. If you use absence/presence, then a merge of (unsubscribed || subscribed) will always result in subscribed - probably not what you want.

Sorry if this little bit of sausage-making bothers you, but it's pretty much how every mailing list works everywhere.

Mailchimp did have a secret key per org specifically to calculate a email address hash id that was unique.. This hash is enough to prevent resubscription when other feeds are brought in. That could at least prevent new employees from seeing my email long after I requested privacy.

Expect everything you send to go straight to spam unless you do a bunch of work with deliverability, which he didn’t really touch on. https://www.mail-tester.com/ (no affiliation) is a good place to start.

You can also use something like postmark for this, which has an unsubscribe feature built in.

Absolutely this. At a previous company we got into a bad place with deliverability and ended up doing a load of work to repair it, several months of engineering time, moving domains, warming IPs, splitting types of email, building out better tracking, and ultimately, just paying the "deliver my email" racket fee to Microsoft.

It said they sent emails previous to this project so presumably that's already been accounted for

Author here. We're using the same mailgun setup that we already use to email our customers, so we're just kind of accepting that it's "good enough".

However, thanks for that link! I sent our newsletter through it and got a 5.9. -3 of that was an easy fix (no mx record for mail.orbitkit.com). I think we can get it to "super good enough" without too much trouble.

Fixing the MX record and adding alt attributes to the images brought the score to 9.9/10. According to mail-tester, if I want the last 0.1, I need to add a text/plain alternative. I suppose if we really cared we could automatically render the html to plain text, but it seems good enough at this point.

At any rate, big thanks for the link - I'll add this to the blog entry.

NP! FWIW, I sucked it up and added a text version to my PhotoStructure emails. I didn’t want to give GOOG an single excuse to not deliver my email.

(Also: I suspect you need to escape your <img> tag in “ensuring that every has an alt tags”)

Fixed - once again, thanks!

My reaction too.

> We aren't tracking open rates. [...] It's not hard.

Dude doesn't know about Apple MPP yet

For some types of business Intercom pricing is hilariously high. It's great if you're selling a high priced SaaS product to a small number of business users. If you're in B2C though it often makes no financial sense because of this per "active" user pricing.

It's not uncommon for a B2B active user to be worth $1k/mo, and a B2C active user to be worth $1 a month. There are great businesses in both of those, but only the former could even consider using Intercom.

Yes. Intercom is terrible. Just as I started reading it I was shocked the bill was so low...

https://medium.com/@Codename_One/why-we-dumped-intercom-and-...

With the advent of LLMs I really do think that we should be able to compose the services we want to match our willing-ness to pay.

I.e use LLMs to generate the required glue code required.

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