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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.