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Comment by inshadows | Hacker News Reader

> Mailchimp began by offering email marketing solutions, and evolved into a global leader in customer engagement and marketing automation fueled by a powerful, cutting-edge AI-driven technology stack.

Why does mail sender (SPAM as a service?) need "AI"?

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Your question makes the following poor assumptions:

1. "AI" exists

2. They are using "AI" to begin with

This is just marketing. Nearly any time you see the phrase "AI" used, it's pure marketing.

AI can refer to classifiers, perhaps neural networks, or some probabilistic algorithms. I find it hard to believe that marketing department would just label something as AI without any underlying algorithm existing[1]. So, for what kind of work does mail sending service needs classifiers/neural networks?

[1] Ignoring outright fraudulent press releases of course. This doesn't seem like a fraudulent company.

Abuse detection, in order to maintain high sender reputation, perhaps?

They've increasingly added features to tell you who on your mailing list to advertise to, how (they also handle Facebook and Google ads, some postal mail, etc.), and when.

They can estimate how likely addresses are to lead to spam complaints (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/), how likely customers are to spend more (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and...), things like that.

at the lower level - detecting senders trying to send spam is a big one as well as detecting sending / deliverability problems

I'm not familiar with what mailchimp is actually doing with their marketing automation / analytics stuff but you could use "AI" ( or basically statistics in this case ) to analyze the resultant data.

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