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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, Mailchimp is a tool specifically built and advertised to send spam.

Mailchimp is for sending emails that people signed up to receive. If enough recipients click "unsubscribe", the whole email campaign gets suspended.

Signed up, or were signed up without their knowledge, or were tricked into signing up.

>Mailchimp is for sending emails that people signed up to receive.

that might be what it is for in a theoretical sense. but that is not how it is being used.

Where does it say on their website that it is specifically for sending spam?

Someone’s marketing emails are someone else’s spam.

Mailchimp is specifically made for mass email emission, for marketing a newsletter and whatnot. So yeah, a lot of people will consider them spammers.

Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk email. Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.

100% of marketing email I've received is spam. I didn't knowingly or willingly sign up for any of it.

There's some delusion in the marketing world that just because someone places an order or creates an account they should be spammed.

Yes, I used to agree with that, but have since given in and accepted that most companies (except mine and a handful of others) will spam all customers who buy a product without asking them first.

It's a little irritating, although I reserve full enmity for the spammers who I've never interacted with ever.

> Marketing is only spam when it isn't previous customers, or people who have specifically opted in.

Yes, this excludes any people, customers or otherwise, who did not knowingly and willingly opt-in to specifically receive marketing emails / promotional emails / any other unnecessary emails.

A good heuristic is: if somebody receives an email from you that they do not want, there's a good chance you're spamming them: maybe by calling a marketing email, an "update" instead; maybe because you didn't make it abundantly clear to them when they opted-in that they would receive emails of that type.

I think thats a really wrong definition of spam. Spam is untargeted junk from people you don't know, who are probably hiding there real identity using fake email headers etc. If it's a legit company with legit unsubscribe options, it's not spam.

It worries me a lot that people clicking "mark as spam" on messages from legit companies because they subscribed to the newsletter will mean that my messages with important information (order confirmations, e-tickets etc.) will get blocked.

That's a spammer's definition. Everyone else's definition is that spam is unsolicited e-mail. Which covers most marketing e-mail, and not just the cold messages, but especially marketing e-mail from vendors you had interacted with in some way in the past.

> It worries me a lot that people clicking "mark as spam" on messages from legit companies because they subscribed to the newsletter will mean that my messages with important information (order confirmations, e-tickets etc.) will get blocked.

They probably didn't subscribe to the newsletter, they were subscribed, or tricked into subscribing. Either way, it's spam, and legitimate companies do not mix transactional e-mail ("order confirmations, e-tickets, etc.") with marketing e-mail.

FWIW, I'm one of such people clicking "mark as spam" on marketing e-mail, and I do it intentionally.

Don't send spam and I won't mark it as spam. I didn't sign up for your newsletter, don't send it to me. Creating an account or placing an order does not mean I agree to your spam.

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