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Comment by Beldin | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't address the original problem: you want users that receive a mail claiming to come from A.com not to click on a link to B.com.

The only advantage that routing clicks through MailChimp has, is clicktracking. Clicktracking can easily - trivially - be handled serverside. Just embed per-recipient unique ids in the url.

If MC is worried about customers lying about #clicks, they coukd easily make all urls point to A.com/mailchimp?mailid=xxx&linknum=yyy.

That forces A.com to run the one thing MC sends them to sort out the clicks... which of course does the clicktracking and hides the useful info from their customers.

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It would be interesting if they could work with Cloudflare, AWS, big small business web hosting providers, etc. and other people in line in processing the click to make special casing the clicktracking URL easy.

Have you ever gotten an email from Synchrony Bank (the Amazon credit card)? Everything about it looks like phishing designed to steal your Amazon ID and login. But nope, it's real. Way to go guys.

Synchrony Bank is the shittiest banking vendor I have ever encountered; cancelled my Amazon Store Card because of how horrible they are. (also the Amazon Prime Chase card gives the same 5% benefit)

That's going to take a lot of processing power to be able to handle their amount of customers on a single domain. Even loadbalanced behind the domain to multiple servers, even running kafka, probably could bottleneck it through a single domain. Regardless, even if you did A.com, you have to redirect the customer to whatever actual link they originally wanted to go too from MailChimp's server, instead of the customers server.

It's really not a problem to handle any number of users on a single domain, you can load balance, serve from different geos, etc.

Case in point: google.com

The real reason they don't do this is because it's a more involved set-up from the customer's side. As people mentioned, enterprise-oriented mail services will do this kind of thing but MailChimp is a long tail solution.

Sorry for not being clear. My idea was a small file on A.com/mailchimp that takes the arguments and passes them on to mailchimp's servers (possibly already spreading, e.g. mailing1.a.com.mailchimp.com/clicktrack?click=...) This would redirect to A.com's targeted link.

The processing power would still be needed on mailchimp's side. All the customer (A.com) does, is add a tiny redirecting script on their site.

It's similar to how one fingerprinter for android works.Get your client to forward you the user details. User only sees the client (so nothing suspicious, no 3rd party to be blocked), while encryption ensures that your client has to forward you the data - they cannot parse it themselves.

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