MailChimp has blocked my newsletter. Help

Has anyone negotiated with Mail Chimp after having been blocked before?

Yes. They blocked Bingo Card Creator back in the day, because of concerns that it was gambling-related. I successfully appealed and convinced them that it was not, in fact, gambling-related.

I'd send them approximately what you just posted. Emphasize that you are from the clean, upstanding side of the Internet and, while you're aware that you happen to abut a hive of scum and villainy, explain that you are squeaky clean. Offer to stop referencing marital aids. If you have external indicia of credibility, I would reference them. ("As cited on 20/20." "Written by a PhD in human sexuality.", etc)

Ultimately, if you can convince a rep at MailChimp, you win. As an anti-spam researcher in a past life, I want to mention the possibility that you're going to lose, even if they trust your intentions. You're a negligible percentage of the email and business originating at a MailChimp IP. It is critically important to them that that IP and the email/business going through it does not get burned. Various automatic and manual processes do not consider your business to be of equal worth with other businesses, and your opinion on that being unfair will not change their mind.

Additionally, and this is just a "facts about the world" thing rather than meant to discourage you as someone making things: "I collate links from across the web" is, virtually everywhere, not seen as a high value-added activity. That goes for MailChimp, for Google, and for virtually anyone else you want to convince to like you. It pattern-matches with "content scraper." I would strongly consider investing in quality first-party "content" which you could thicken with curated links rather than relying on the curated links being the whole of the offering. You've already got two and a half strikes against you due to the nature of the business.

Thanks Patio. Totally understand what you're saying. 'tis an unlikely outcome.

With regards to the 'collate links from across the web' - I should maybe reword this. Thanks for the feedback.

I should add, building a mailing list and delivering relevant content (currently, 'collate links from across the web') has a 60-70% open rate and 40-50% click through. Already, I've proven I'm adding value based on quant and qual research.

Having said that, a simple mailing list isn't the future of Pillow Talk- a crowdsourced sex tips platform, is. This is just the early stages.

----- Message From MailChimp -----

Hello Darren,

As a bulk delivery service, a huge part of our job is providing great deliverability for all our customers. ISPs and spam filters are becoming more sensitive to certain types of keywords and content.

Keeping this in mind, MailChimp is not able to serve as your email provider, because the content associated with your industry conflicts with our acceptable use policy. For direct questions regarding our acceptable use policy and the types of content that aren’t supported, please visit our Acceptable Use policy under Prohibited Content: http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use

Nothing personal against your content or industry; there are just some very strict spam filters and ISP rules that we have to comply with to maintain the best possible sending environment. These filters are becoming increasingly sensitive to certain keywords because some industries tend to generate greater than average complaint rates (legit or not) with their emails. A risk that we unfortunately cannot take.

We appreciate your understanding in this matter.

The account is open so that you may log in anytime to back up data. If you have any questions related to billing, please contact billing@mailchimp.com.

All the best,

The MailChimp Compliance Team

Thanks for following up with their reply. I appreciate you sharing, so the rest of us can learn from your experience.

Maybe you can look into Sendgrid as an alternative? http://sendgrid.com/

Best of luck! Taylor

Disclaimer: I work for an ESP (not MC).

So this is a deliverability issue, and might not entirely be MCs fault (though it is of course their decision). Whether people realize it or not, you don't use us just so the don't have to maintain email servers (that's part of it), but also to make sure that the email they send ends up where it's intended to go (most of the time). That's not just making sure all the SMTP rules are followed, DKIM/SPF/etc. are right, IPs are kept off RBLs, etc., etc. Email hosts also look at the reputation of the email sender in determining whether to deliver to their customers. Email senders have to walk a careful line with the ISPs (Google, Yahoo, Comcast, etc) who provide email to end users. If an ESP sends too much email that tickles a spam filter at an ISP, the ISP will block the ESP, which is a major business hit. Bonus: we rarely know what the thresholds are, and it changes all the time. If we get blocked it can impact much more than one client, and we then have to negotiate with the ISP and convince them that we haven't gone bad, we're policing our clients, and pretty please let us send them mail. We have an entire team of people (10+ folks) that do nothing but manage those relationships. When this happens enough with a single client, even if they aren't technically in the wrong, it's a business decision as to whether the client is worth keeping.

:( That's pretty much the same response I received when I argued my case years ago.

Oh man. Just from looking at the title, I had a feeling your might be in the adult space. The same happened to me. We were using Mailchimp to send technical newsletters to our registered developers.

I did try speaking with someone at Mailchimp to plead our case. Unfortunately it didn't work. You might have some luck though because you're more in the health & wellness area of the industry, whereas I own an adult app store, so I'm 100% in the "porn" side of it.

There are some adult friendly newsletter services out there, but they're usually very costly. I think I saw one a few years back that was $150 a month. We've been using Amazon SES to send verification emails for new registrations, so we opted for SES for our monthly dev newsletter, neither of which have any porn or adult content in them whatsoever.

Isn't SES strictly for transactional emails?

Nope, you can use it lots of other messaging, like marketing, newsletters, and notifications.

In my experience MailChimp customer service is hard to deal with and they don't really try to work with you even when you have a legitimate claim like you have. Also MailChimp will not give you any specific information about why you were shutdown other than just generic information.

I would suggestion just switching to another service. I've had better experience with https://mailgun.com/ because they will try to work with you more. They also have more options so if your industry is high risk, you can use your own IP addresses but still get the MailGun service.

Thanks! That's the second mail gun recommendation I've had, but as a product guy (not a dev) I was trying to stay away having to set this up! :)

----- Draft Email I am Crafting in Reply -----

Hey MailChimper's!

Thanks for the clear communication in the MailChimp Compliance email I have received. The ability to send email from my account has been blocked. I regretfully understand as to why my account has been blocked thus far. Having said that, I have a few questions.

Pillow Talk provide a weekly collection of links from across the web to educate couples on how to have a better sex life. The majority of links I include are from legitimate blogs, Reddit, YouTube, IMDB and Amazon.

We’re not a scammers or spammers and every recipient has has to double opt in to receiving this email. I appreciate that your abuse prevention system Omnivore, has highlighted ‘content, keywords or activity’ that 'indicate the possibility of harmful information being sent through your service’ and I’d love to understand exactly what we’re doing that is inappropriate?

I was attempting to send issue 8 of Pillow Talk last Friday 17th October. I have used Mail Chimp for 7 weeks without any problems. Why now? What exactly has caused Omnivore to highlight us?

Our email is clearly about sex, but we’re not sending thousands of emails selling viagra pills or pornography! I understand why your ToS has been written the way it is, but I can’t imagine it's for small educational mailing lists like ours. I feel we have been bucketed with all the ‘bad guys’, but clearly we’re trying to educate, not spam!

In the last issue, I did include a link to a porn site— for an educational how-to video. I’m very happy not linking to porn sites if this is the issue? Please could you confirm?

It’s a really unfortunate kick in the teeth. I’m at the beginning of building a sexual education platform for the 21st century and already hitting institutional roadblocks and rules which are there to stop the scammers and spammers, not legitimate businesses trying to educate couples!

I please, please, kindly ask you to review your decision. I know you don’t have to at all! But, for everyone suffering from boring sex in the long term relationships, or for all the sexless marriages out there, this is a huge problem for millions. We need to get better at talking and learning about sex and at the moment the scammers, spammers and porn industry are winning because they’re making it difficult for anyone legitimate to make things better! Can you be part of helping stop that, please?

My rewrite (focused more on emphasizing your legitimacy and less on emoting about MailChimp's policies):

----

Hiya MailChimpers,

Pillow Talk, a curated newsletter to assist couples with romantic and sexual aspects of their relationships, was recently blocked. I would like to request that you reconsider.

I'm aware that adult-oriented businesses are historically considered high-risk in email sending. Pillow Talk is not an adult-oriented business. We're an educational resource which happens to discuss human sexuality. Our content is not explicit and largely consists of links to reputable websites, such as IMDB, Amazon, and [a blog maintained by a Harvard PhD in human sexuality would be a really good thing to mention right now]. We do not include or link to obscene materials -- the raciest it gets would still pass muster at a Borders in Kansas. [Patrick notes: If not true, apologize and fix.]

Previously, we have from time-to-time included affiliate links to marital aids. On re-reading your TOS, I found that this was disallowed, so we will stop doing so immediately.

I understand that MailChimp cannot afford to have elevated complaint rates from flight-by-night operators in seedy sectors. We run a tight ship here, with all emails collected in a proper double opt-in fashion. As you can verify in our account, our complaint rate is [1 / 40,000 emails or whatever], which is well-within industry norms.

Given that we're an upstanding educational publication and that MailChimp is the best choice for permission-based email marketing, we're hoping to continue using your service. If possible, please reconsider the suspension of our account.

If you have any questions, I can be reached at 555 555-5555 or via email.

Regards,

$YOU

Patio, that reply is immense. Thank you for taking the time.

I will make a couple additions and send it off to them tomorrow! Will let you know how it goes :)

Cheers

They still haven't replied to me. Ah well. I'm using GetResponse for now :)

I've had nothing but bad experiences with mailchimp.

Switch over to aweber, getresponse, etc.

Good shout! Thanks Jordsmi