Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails

https://futurism.com/mailchimp-is-shutting-down-ico-and-blockchain-related-emails-and-people-are-freaking-out/

by stoev • 8 years ago

246 136 8 years ago

futurism.com

CamelCaseName• 8 years ago

I'm surprised they claimed the issue was legality and not deliverability.

I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.

stoev5• 8 years ago

When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.

When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.

What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.

A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.

lawnchair• 8 years ago

100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.

stoev5• 8 years ago

I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).

Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.

hanbura2• 8 years ago

Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want?

Sure, in the same sense we can be appalled by anything we want and boycott things for any or no reason.

There is no legal question here, but the moral question is far less clear cut.

lightedman• 8 years ago

"can't Mailchimp do whatever they want?"

No, they're in fact limited by the contract they present when they offer you their service and relevant laws that may supercede parts of that contract. That would include some privacy laws.

payne92• 8 years ago

They're not "censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology"; read their policy carefully:

>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<<

Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp.

As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.

untog• 8 years ago

Counterpoint: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production and sale of handbags, but I don't see Mailchimp blocking that any time soon.

I agree that as a private company they can do what they want, but I wonder if they're setting themselves a difficult precedent here.

millettjon2• 8 years ago

In fact they are in at least some cases. https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/979489136439693313

SilasX• 8 years ago

I mostly agree but this:

>not involved in the exchange of cryptocurrencies

... seems overkill. So any journalist who has actually transacted with Bitcoins is off the platform? That seems like mainly negative effects from the standpoint of "selecting for informed journalists".

"Sure, you can use our platform to talk about cryptocurrencies, as long as you're just one of those admire-from-a-distance types."

Ditto for production -- that would include e.g. anyone who's contributed code.

prklmn• 8 years ago

With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud.

It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.

stoev5• 8 years ago

"They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud."

Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.

This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.

JohnnyConatus• 8 years ago

IANAL, is this a real risk? This sounds like suing a paper company for a ransom note written on it's paper. You can bring a suit for nearly anything but it feels like there would be a lot of precedent to immediately dismiss it.

nokcha• 8 years ago

They wouldn't be held legally liable. (CDA Section 230.) The real problem is that ICO emails tend to set off spam filters, and this could damage the deliverability of all mail originating from MailChimp.

foepys• 8 years ago

Why is Facebook's decision okay but Mailchimp's is evil? If anything Facebook has a social network monopoly while Mailchimp is one of dozens of mailing providers.

Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.

stoev5• 8 years ago

Because Facebook is blocking ads that will probably not be missed by many people. They still allow you to post about blockchain. Mailchimp apparently doesn't.

nvr219• 8 years ago

A private company censoring

A private company cannot censor.

bmelton• 8 years ago

A private company can censor, and they often do. That is just not a form of censorship that the first amendment provides you any defense for.

Spivak2• 8 years ago

It's not really that different from Google. Mailchimp is a marketing/advertising platform that has every right to be selective about who their clients are^1. Their entire business is about managing their reputation with customers and email providers and blockchain scams are hurting that. Trying to pretend that marketing spam is deservant of free speech considerations and tantamount to 'discussion' is silly.

Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so.

^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.

aiCeivi9• 8 years ago

Any mail sending company will preemptive ban some clients. If they end up on DBLs or start being blocked by GMail, it is already too late.

api• 8 years ago

They are trying to get out of the way of the oncoming train of lawsuits and criminal charges that's going to hit us when the ICO/crypto bubble really deflates.

spamizbad2• 8 years ago

Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.

Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.

spectre256• 8 years ago

This is exactly what I assumed caused them to make this decision.

Who knows, a lot of Mailchimp employees might even really like blockchain tech, or be intererested in ICOs, but at the end of the day, if serving ICO/blockchain mail results in lots of emails marked as spam, it puts their whole business at risk.

ISL2• 8 years ago

A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs us n% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at n% the usual price."

It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.

If n is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.

wslh• 8 years ago

They banned "Week in Ethereum" feed so you don't know if they are banning your email using the word "pepsico" because they found ICO in a simple search regexp or even Ethereum in different contexts.

I completely understand banning ICO spams which at the end are just spams.

disiplus• 8 years ago

i dont think its only that. there is also the aspect of being a target of tons of hackers trying to hack they way into ICOs accounts and gaining access to all users registered for ICOs and sending them mails trying to scam them to send the Ether to some other address. I saw it happening first hand.

So a handful of criminals are ruining it for everybody else. Im not even talking about some of the ICOs being "scams", what clearly is the case and happens.

millettjon2• 8 years ago

They could easily route riskier traffic over a separate set of ips and domains without affecting delivery of other domains. This is standard practice in the industry.

rocqua2• 8 years ago

I'd guess that the spam filters probably go crazy because users actually mark this kind of email as spam. If so, this is the system working. People say something is spam, and less of that kind of email gets sent.

massaman_yams4• 8 years ago

I gave tagged email addresses out to a couple ICOs a while back, and they have been repeatedly sold off and sent spam by completely unrelated companies (usually through Sendgrid, incidentally - though Sendgrid has been good at shutting them down for anti-spam policy violations after the fact).

The ICO industry in general has shown its lack of respect for securities law (though there are exceptions); why would they adhere to a less well-regulated standard like opt-in for email?

The thing is, this is only incidentally about deliverability. Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure. But ICO related email is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of messages they send daily for non-crypto related businesses, and having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability. In addition, Gmail's smart enough to tell the difference between individual senders on Mailchimp's platform.

Mailchimp cares more about stopping email abuse (e.g., users sending spam to purchased lists) than they care about ensuring good deliverability. The two are closely related, but there are distinctions - the former is based on specific standards and policies, and enforced at a lower level than the latter.

I see this move as: considerations around widespread lack of opt-in standards for ICO related senders, plus concern over the level of fraud occurring in ICOs, and potential liability resulting from that.

Edit: reviewing some of the ICO spam I've received, about 30% of it has been obviously fraudulent/phishing - using lookalike Coinbase or Binance domains to try to trick people into sending tokens to a fraudster, for example.

vlucas• 8 years ago

What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.

It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.

chrononaut2• 8 years ago

I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example,

- Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome.

- Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform.

- Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.

Retric• 8 years ago

Mailchimp's business is specifically to get around spam filters. An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.

lev99• 8 years ago

Why do you think Facebook, Google, and Mailchimp are censoring blockchain related content?

Sangermaine2• 8 years ago

A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott.

You're being ridiculous and disingenuous.

MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/

When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans?

This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.

massaman_yams4• 8 years ago

And I would add that spam, in the US, is "perfectly legal". CAN-SPAM, even if it was aggressively enforced, effectively only requires marketing email to contain a valid postal address for the sender and a working unsubscribe link - it doesn't require opt-in.

skybrian• 8 years ago

Google already bans ads for firearms, fireworks, and tobacco products. There are restrictions on adult content, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and financial services [1].

They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard.

[1] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=e...

joering2• 8 years ago

Just if someone is sleeping at the wheel — this is perfect opportunity to create “google for googles prohibited items”. Nothing illegal in advertising these products.

cm2187• 8 years ago

The same issue happened recently with youtube banning videos from fire arms enthusiasts. One might disagree with their political stance but they are entitled to do so.

gwbas1c• 8 years ago

Blame the fraudsters for ruining the research.

emodendroket• 8 years ago

But this is a pretty predictable result of having privately owned services like this be such a big part of the Internet. MailChimp, understandably, doesn't want to be associated with this content, and they are under no obligation to allow it.

aje403• 8 years ago

It would be great if comments like yours included a disclosure of personal crypto currency holdings at the bottom

The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)

wuliwong2• 8 years ago

I agree and further promote alternative companies that do not censor cryptocurrency-related information.

paulcole• 8 years ago

they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.

Good!

They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.

manigandham• 8 years ago

None of this is censoring. The government is not prosecuting this speech (which falls under commercial and is not completely free) and closed platforms can do whatever they want. In fact, as the last 100 topics have shown, regulation in digital advertising is sorely needed.

Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.

notyourwork• 8 years ago

Email is an open platform, mailchimp is not. This is a distinction your argument fails to accept.

s73v3r_4• 8 years ago

I'm getting really tired of the misuse of the word "censorship" when it comes to topics like this. Mailchimp is not censoring anything. They are not preventing those advertisers from getting their message out. What they are doing is choosing not to partner and work with people they believe might be likely scammers. Something we all do. If you want to complain about that, then you're saying that a person should no longer be able to choose who they do business with. Do you want to be compelled to buy a car from the shady dealer with a reputation for selling lemons? If not, then why should Mailchimp?

scriptstar• 8 years ago

I thought MailChimp is a forward thinking company and by the looks it’s not

tzahola• 8 years ago

Forward-thinking?? They basically deliver spam on a large scale.

jessaustin• 8 years ago

In the spam economy, up is down and left is right. If they used plain understandable language, they'd never be able to look in the mirror.

nukeop• 8 years ago

I'm sure there are many people who think this is ok, because it's not the government doing this, but a "private company". Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?

Veen• 8 years ago

The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone.

What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.

vertex-four• 8 years ago

Actually, not anyone with an email server can do it. That's literally MailChimp's value proposition - that they have servers that are trusted by the major email providers and so have high delivery rates. In order to compete with them, you must ensure that your servers are similarly trusted - the process by which this happens being an undocumented black box that is different for each email provider, which often involves having personal contacts at those providers.

In other words - there's a high barrier to entry and you can't provide the service at all if you don't have a certain amount of volume to make a certain amount of profit to cover operating costs. Targeting a niche will not provide that volume.

notahacker2• 8 years ago

I'd be surprised if someone, somewhere isn't marketing a "marketing automation delivered via blockchain" startup. :)

pavlov• 8 years ago

Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?

That's been well known since at least 1848...

notahacker2• 8 years ago

We asked a few more questions about how MailChimp can actually delineate between emails from people involved in the shilling and profiteering of blockchain and ICOs versus people having news-related discussions of blockchain and ICOs (because, LOL, in the current moment, most non-algorithmic humans have a justifiably tough time distinguishing between the two)

The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams.

Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.

zitterbewegung2• 8 years ago

Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY.

Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?

mhsabbagh• 8 years ago

Mailerlite is good: mailerlite.com

omarchowdhury• 8 years ago

Drip

jasonlotito• 8 years ago

They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO or crypto?

zitterbewegung2• 8 years ago

I plan on doing it. Also, my consulting is related to ICO and crypto now so I don't want to be associated with it.

philipodonnell• 8 years ago

People are getting real confused about "blockchain" as a technology and several specific use cases (cryptocurrencies and ICOs). The article seems to only draw a distinction between crpto and news about crypto.

Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?

idontpost4389• 8 years ago

Every time something like this happens when company XZ decides they will block any content about YX or people associated with it, there's always a lot of discussion about it being considered censorship or why it isn't because they aren't the government but instead a business.

I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform.

I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result.

[0] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...

JamesLeonis• 8 years ago

There's a lot of handwringing over whether Mailchimp did the right/wrong/good/bad/neutral thing, or why ICOs in particular.

But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.

In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool?

A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.

Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.

The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.

Winter came, and it was us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

pjc50• 8 years ago

My preferred analogy is with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania : enough fraud can collapse a country.

creeble• 8 years ago

Not sure why people are so upset with Mailchimp when they are simply reacting to what the blacklist operators do, which is their whole value proposition. They don't want to send content that triggers blacklists, whether that content is for ICOs or Beanie Babies.

Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?

_asciiker_• 8 years ago

Sentopia.net founder here, I don't believe this is just Mailchimp, we have received a warning from Paypal entitled "Cryptocurrency warning." where it states "(...)we noticed that your activity involves the trading or transfer of crypto currency which is prohibited under our Acceptable Use Policy. As this is not permitted on the PayPal platform we ask that you cease any activity that results in the trading or transfer of crypto currency."

We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all.

Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.

rargulati• 8 years ago

What alternatives to Mailchimp would folks recommend? The ideal alternative would have the following desirable components:

- A reasonable to use API

- A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider)

- Not painful to use

vamin• 8 years ago

SendGrid has a newsletter/marketing product called "Marketing Campaigns" that's worth a look, it satisfies those three requirements.

xtracto• 8 years ago

I'd like to second SendGrid.

In my previous job, we were using MailChimp until they decided that for some reason some of the communication (the campaings that are created manually via their interface) with our clients was spam. They did not give us any warning but one day they blocked everything, including the API (mandrillapp), which our system was using to send email as part of our process.

We moved our mail lists to SendGrid while decoupling the API, using AWS SNS for that.

I hate companies that treat you as if they were doing you a favour (we were paying customers, and worse that they don't sit down and talk to understand what is the situation. No business sense at all.

mvindahl• 8 years ago

I would imagine that if all the crypto people moved to some smaller email service with a more lenient policy, this service would end up with far bigger deliverability and blacklisting problems than Mailchimp ever had.

From here, it may be possible to kick the bucket down the road a couple of times but basically I think it's game over.

eterps• 8 years ago

See https://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/ for a list of alternatives.

patchfm• 8 years ago

Big fan of Mailjet (mailjet.com), biggest email provider in the EU and their API powers SF companies like Product Hunt and MileIQ. Both marketing emails and transactional

kureikain• 8 years ago

I think this make sense for Mailchimp. The tweet says in 4 weeks advance which I consider long enough to migrate out.

Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...

eco• 8 years ago

I filed two abuse reports with Mailchimp just in the last week over unsolicited ICO mailings. One was for an AIDS vaccine ICO (I don't even know what that means and I don't want to know).

I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.

trophycase• 8 years ago

Will this affect those who directly signed up for a newsletter?

arisAlexis2• 8 years ago

blockchain is a legit technology what's with the hate?

asdsa5325• 8 years ago

Never understood why blockchain is referred to as a "technology".

Do we talk about Red black tree technology? Linked list technology? That sounds silly, doesn't it?

arisAlexis2• 8 years ago

never read a more irrelevant comment actually. no blockchain as a tech is not the silly thing here.

logfromblammo• 8 years ago

It makes more sense if you consider that accounts relating more directly to cryptocurrencies and ICOs are juicier targets for spear-phishers, which makes Mailchimp a target for social engineering and direct intrusion.

If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out.

It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.

rdl• 8 years ago

So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business.

21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.

TearsInTheRain• 8 years ago

I would really appreciate it if tech companies stopped acting like everybody's nanny and allowed people to take responsibility for their own actions.

hippich• 8 years ago

Hm.. We use Mailchimp for our rather smallish mailing list at hashcash.io, and we are "producing", so I guess we are about to be slashed..

For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.

Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails

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