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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

We've had a similar experience. We use them for both marketing mass emails and for ingesting support ticket emails (I believe that's through Mandrill). Someone sent a marketing email they didn't like (they said another one of their customers complained about it, or something; literally one complaint) and so they silently shut off our incoming email. We noticed it when one of our customers called to ask why we hadn't replied to one of their support tickets. They didn't bother to tell us.

It's a big bag of "do not recommend".

(As for how we manage to use them for incoming email; emails go to a gsuite inbox, which forwards them to MC/Mandrill, when then calls a webhook to actually process the email further. Yes, we could do way better with our own SMTP server that cuts them out. I think this architecture was chosen to have a failsafe in the event that our services all go down.)

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And yet I still get junk from MC senders for which I never subscribed. I report as spam, but those people still keep sending with no problems. (Anecdote, I report as spam an email sent to me@mybusiness.com, then get emails from the same sender at info@mybusiness.com, support@mybusiness.com and finally to emails that aren’t even real such as contrived first_initial_lastname@mybusiness.com (which aren’t in use but go to a catchall, so clearly some “marketing person” just added me to a list without any consent at all.)

At all times these are reported as spam. Then, when we, a few years ago sent out a new feature announcement and a request for a follow up appointment, our account gets frozen for sending unsolicited marketing emails — to our actual customers who have opted in to our emails! Emails that complied with every bit of the anti-spam laws. So Mailchimp arbitrarily lets through their massive enterprise senders sending actual unsolicited emails but freezes their smaller (but still paid) customers sending marketing to actual, current customers.

Anecdotes aren’t data, but for us, it was reality.

I seem to be constantly checking "I never signed up for this mail list" buttons on MailChimp unsubscribe pages. Eventually I got curious if this actually does anything and looked into it; as far as I could tell from their docs, it does nothing but inform the mailer that you are of the opinion that you never subscribed to their list. Very useful.

No, MC definitely uses that data as part of their anti-spam operations. Source: have attended a few presentations by MC anti-abuse people.

That's what a secondary MX is for.

A secondary MX record doesn't solve the problem of "accept email and silently route to /dev/null".

Aside telling the sender or receiver, there's no good way to know. I guess you could send a test email every hour.... But this is an evil failure mode. This isn't an accident.

They wouldn't shut you down if they received just one complain, there is a very explicit process for opt-out / unsuscribe that you have to comply with. You're probably not telling the whole story here.

https://mailchimp.com/help/about-unsubscribes/

Similar problem happened to me with a hobby project. They can and most definitely do shut you down for a single complaint.

Did you comply with the link I sent?

Yes. It’s probably best to not assume malice here.

Not disputing that sometimes that might be the case, but I knew someone who was using a shady list, sending out to 20k+ people, and every time they sent out a blast they got multiple complaints...but never shut down.

So maybe the answer is more complicated.

Possibly a lot of inconsistency because of a quickly grown abuse team that has to get through a ton of cases a day.

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