MailChimp Bans Emails Promoting Cryptocurrency (gizmodo.com)

"MailChimp to Cryptocurrency Promoters: Your Fake Money's No Good Here," jokes the headline at Gizmodo. The mass emailing service -- which sends over a billion emails a day -- just updated its Acceptable Use Policy to warn users that MailChimp "does not allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing, or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities."

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: The ban on cryptocurrency promotion isn't out of the blue so much as a clarification of existing use policies... In a statement to Gizmodo, MailChimp further clarified: "We recognize that blockchain technology is in its infancy and has tremendous potential. Nonetheless, the promotion and exchange of cryptocurrencies is too frequently associated with scams, fraud, phishing, and potentially misleading business practices at this time..." MailChimp previously held policies prohibiting multi-level marketing, "make money online" businesses, and "industries hav[ing] higher-than-average abuse complaints," and earmarked "online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content" for "additional scrutiny..."

This follows similar, though less restrictive bans by Facebook (and Instagram by extension), Google, Linkedin, Twitter, and Snapchat on ICO ads, and country-wide bans in China and South Korea.
Futurism reports that the first victims are "responding in kind by attempting to read the riot act to a Twitter account whose avatar is a monkey with a hat," strongly informing that monkey that "Centralized capricious power is exactly why we need blockchains."

Comments

Re:Sounds racist

[NettiWelho]

they should ban their own racist name

Speciest, or you're the racist.

They more than doubled our price...

[greenwow]

a couple of years ago blaming a company named Mandrill that they merged with. We refused to honor that much higher price because we had a contract with them. They didn't honor that contract.

Re: They more than doubled our price...

[greenwow]

Chimp isn't that racist since it is somewhat positive. We all like to watch videos of chimps.

Re: They more than doubled our price...

[rtb61]

We are all mud monkeys - Earth Primates, well by far the majority of us, I will make no claim for or against visiting anthropologists or how far replication of Earth's internet has spread ;).

Re: They more than doubled our price...

[ArmoredDragon]

Serves you right for patronizing a company that is in the business of spamming.

Re: They more than doubled our price...

[greenwow]

Spam using MailChimp and see how fast they ban you. Seriously, they're very good and fast at weeding out bad actors.

Why so little competition, anyway?

[King_TJ]

It seems like every company I ever work for, or anyone I talk to needing to do mass mailings for an organization or charity resorts to using MailChimp.

It's not really something I've looked closely at, since I work in I.T. taking care of systems, support and network infrastructure. (If you want to do a mass mailing, we make sure your computer and the Internet are working properly so you can pursue that. But we're not going to hand-hold you through signing up for a 3rd. party service or what-not.)

But I find it odd that there doesn't seem to be much competition at all for this? (I know "Constant Contact" comes up often as an alternative, but I believe that one costs more or has other reason it's often skipped over after an initial review of it?)

Isn't bulk emailing something that's relatively easy to bolt a UI on the front for and sell as a service? Why is MailChimp such a powerhouse for this?

Re:Why so little competition, anyway?

[klingens]

Yes it's easy to do, but probably even easier to land on a gazillion spam lists in a business like this.
I don't ever use mailchimp and have to my knowledge, never received mail from them but if mailchimp has a reasonable easy to use UI which is suited for office drones and more importantly the goodwill of the important mail recipients, aka gmail, yahoo, microsoft and all the other mail providers, then they'd have pretty much a lock in in this market.

So slapping together something that sends mail is easy, but the trick is to have someone, or ideally all, to actually be prepared to receive it.

Re: Why so little competition, anyway?

[ArmoredDragon]

This company is expressly in the business of spamming. You know how I know it's spam? Because they hold a few thousand domains, which they actively use to evade DNS filters. This company probably isn't banning crypto because of a moral obligation of any sort, likely it's so they can safely remain under the radar of club fed.

Re:Why so little competition, anyway?

[tlhIngan]

sn't bulk emailing something that's relatively easy to bolt a UI on the front for and sell as a service? Why is MailChimp such a powerhouse for this?

Bulk emailing is easy to do technically. But socially, it's very hard.

First off, there are dozens of spam laws throughout the world, and at the very least, the unsubscribe links must work. Companies like MailChimp, Vertical Response and others automatically handle unsubscription for you - if a user clicks the link, they will remove it.

They also handle things like double opt-in, and some offer the ability to ask the user after a year or so if they wish to remain on the list.

It's not the SMTP part that's hard, it's the whole "mailing list maintenance" that's hard. And the companies do respond to email providers whose users do not want to receive the mail anymore - often times if you click "This is spam", a notification is sent back to the company to remove you from future mailings (i.e., they will unsubscribe you).

There's also the side services - the whole "If you can't read this email, click here" where they open a new web page with the email in question (including customizations, if needed).

These companies are few because it's hard to navigate the whole legal waters - and yes, they are trying to stay on the legal side of everything, including keeping up with spam law changes and navigating around filters and blocks. And they offer value-added services (like the web-page versions of email), and analytical information like how many emails were sent, how many were technically failed (bad address, address blocked, full, etc), how many clicked the unsubscribe link, how many didn't make it through a block or filter, how many were reported, etc.

In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if those companies worked hand in hand with all the big providers to whitelist their servers, in exchange for having enhanced handling (i.e., if a user complains, those will get forwarded to removal from the list).

And yes, I've always threatened to click the unsubscribe link on the company emails - the marketing ones that get sent out (and CC'd internally). I know it would work automatically since by law the email company has to remove that address from the list.

Re:Why so little competition, anyway?

[pnutjam]

We use sendgrid at work, they do a pretty good job. We mostly send reports and stuff, not spam.

" The mass emailing service"

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Spam Facilitation Company.

Is Spamford Wallace involved?

Re: Sounds racist

[K. S. Kyosuke]

No, it's not, because most people don't even speak English, and of those who do, most would only incomprehensibly stare at your statements.

Re:Boohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even know what blockchains ARE, it's sad. A block chain doesn't replace anyone's decision making, it is only a source of historical information... The stupid thing about block chains as implemented in Bitcoin is that it makes Bitcoin and all it's derivative or copycat currencies are all ONLINE currencies... You have to be online to check with some authority whether your buyer really has the money. It's the same as using real currency online, actually worse because you end up paying more and waiting longer for that confirmation. Bitcoin hasn't solved anything.

When we have a way to exchange digital cash OFFLINE (i.e. peer to peer without a central authority involved in each transaction) with the same or better security than real cash, then we will have something useful.

We're moving beyond "protecting the customer"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is now out and out the blocking of cryptocurrency on the internet.

Fascism has come to planet Earth.

Re:We're moving beyond "protecting the customer"

[rbrander]

Pretty sure it was already here.

Also, that a private service refusing to do business with certain customers is not it.

What a day

[AndyKron]

I'm sure glad people are there to decide what I should and shouldn't see. I hate it when I have to think for myself.

While monetary freedom scares some others embrace

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience has been that where some people have been scared off or lost interest in crypto currency in areas that have an insufficient support base there are some places like all of southern New Hampshire that have embraced it whole heartedly and today there are more local merchants accepting crypto currencies than at any time in the past and more places accepting than anywhere else in the world. I made four transactions locally just yesterday at different restaurants and merchants in my town.

Comparatively I think in larger cities with more businesses makes things more difficult. Particularly when there isn't a large user base who already understand the value of crypto currencies. You need to have the right ratio of users to businesses and supporters and we just don't have that anywhere outside of New Hampshire. Not even Austin, Texas which many claim to be libertarian friendly (though based on recent attempts to spend crypto in Austin I highly doubt these claims).

Comparatively in New Hampshire we have a lot of people who understand the value of retaining control over ones own money (be it physical money or digital) which has resulted in a larger number of users and supporters within a smaller population all of which are near-each-other in which to get on board (all of New Hampshire has roughly 1.3 million and of those most are in souther New Hampshire within 1-1/2 hours drive of each other compared to Boston, NYC, LA, Austin, and other cities all nearing or exceeding the population of NH).

I think what we are going to see is crypto currency being more or less adopted by technical persons and libertarians in centrally located regions (ie probably southern New Hampshire exclusively because its the only large concentration of technical persons and libertarians in the world) followed by it spreading to less technical people both in New Hampshire and surrounding areas.

I think we already are seeing that as businesses in various cities discontinue acceptance from lack of demand and users while the cities and towns in southern New Hampshire see increasing numbers coming on board. Two New Hampshire cities already have the highest number of crypto accepting businesses in the world on a per capita basis and it looks like we are seeing accelerated adoption here now that there are multiple operations marketing crypto to businesses and users alike. Interesting fact: Most business owners in New Hampshire are not converting to USD- but rather they are holding and/or spending crypto.

If nothing else- crypto is here to stay- at least in New Hampshire and amongst technical people world wide. As a business owner that does business around the world (about 50% is outside the United States) I see a lot of technical people utilizing it- but a disproportionate percentage of users are clearly in New Hampshire. That is not to say we don't get more people out of state spending it with us. We do- but relative to the population size we see more people using it here than anywhere else. If you are a technical person that believes in freedom there is no where better to live.

Privacy Violation

[Khyber]

Pretty sure they can't discern mere discussion of it versus sale of it unless they're violating your privacy and reading every single one, given machine learning with regards to context is highly lacking.

Re:Privacy Violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really a 'violation' for a mass emailing service to read what you want them to send? I'd think it's expected, similarly with a newspaper reading an ad you want to place.

Re:Boohoo

[Desler]

0/10. Try harder.

Nothing of value lost

[Anonymous Coward]

A company built on sending spam refusing to spam shit regarding fake "money" is all this is.

Re:Boohoo

[Joce640k]

Mod parent up. Do any of these people even know what a "blockchain" is?

(apart from 'a buzzword')

Hint: It's just a digital signature.

Re:Who the fuck cares

[pnutjam]

We send handle mobile phones for large companies and send lots of reports and other relevent emails. We use a similar service, sendgrid.
It helps keep us off the blacklists and stay in compliance. We also don't have to worry about an running an open relay or something on accident, all our automated mail goes through sendgrid.
We use O365 for regular email.

Re:Boohoo

[jwymanm]

This makes no sense. Blockchain ecosystem solves a lot of problems and it introduces opensource to damn near every process and can replace companies, governments, central banks/authorities, entire financial markets. It is a huge deal bigger than you point out. You can exchange offline using paper wallets that provide a private key that is scratched off by the receiver (or even simply just transferring any usb ledger). There are entire one off private key devices that the original vendor nor the distributor have until they break a part of the device to release it. It's called opendime (opendime.com). Damn near 90% of /. people don't know what the fuck they are so upset with blockchain over. The rest are like uhh my video cards !@#!#!. Like your fucking gaming is more important than getting money distributed open and freely using opensource to anyone in the world with peer to peer access to one another. If you join us in crypto you can help make this world more free and help liberate people from tyrannical governments. If playing a fucking video game is more important to you then whatever. It's the same crowd probably against getting the world connected. Ohh but they need food first!?!? No they need education and organization and unity and money. Computers can bring that now thanks to open blockchain technology.