Comment by darrenjsmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darrenjsmith | Hacker News Reader

----- 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

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

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.

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