MailChimp Bans Emails Promoting Cryptocurrency (gizmodo.com) 48
"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."
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."
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they should ban their own racist name
Speciest, or you're the racist.
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They more than doubled our price... (Score:2)
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.
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Chimp isn't that racist since it is somewhat positive. We all like to watch videos of chimps.
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We are all mud monkeys - Earth Primates, well by far the majority of us, I will make no claim for or against visiting anthropologists or how far replication of Earth's internet has spread ;).
Re: They more than doubled our price... (Score:2)
Serves you right for patronizing a company that is in the business of spamming.
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Spam using MailChimp and see how fast they ban you. Seriously, they're very good and fast at weeding out bad actors.
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They don't even know what blockchains ARE, it's sad. A block chain doesn't replace anyone's decision making, it is only a source of historical information... The stupid thing about block chains as implemented in Bitcoin is that it makes Bitcoin and all it's derivative or copycat currencies are all ONLINE currencies... You have to be online to check with some authority whether your buyer really has the money. It's the same as using real currency online, actually worse because you end up paying more and waiti
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Mod parent up. Do any of these people even know what a "blockchain" is?
(apart from 'a buzzword')
Hint: It's just a digital signature.
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0/10. Try harder.
Why so little competition, anyway? (Score:3)
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?
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Yes it's easy to do, but probably even easier to land on a gazillion spam lists in a business like this.
I don't ever use mailchimp and have to my knowledge, never received mail from them but if mailchimp has a reasonable easy to use UI which is suited for office drones and more importantly the goodwill of the important mail recipients, aka gmail, yahoo, microsoft and all the other mail providers, then they'd have pretty much a lock in in this market.
So slapping together something that sends mail is easy, bu
Re: Why so little competition, anyway? (Score:2)
This company is expressly in the business of spamming. You know how I know it's spam? Because they hold a few thousand domains, which they actively use to evade DNS filters. This company probably isn't banning crypto because of a moral obligation of any sort, likely it's so they can safely remain under the radar of club fed.
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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 li
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" The mass emailing service" (Score:2)
Spam Facilitation Company.
Is Spamford Wallace involved?
We're moving beyond "protecting the customer" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is now out and out the blocking of cryptocurrency on the internet.
Fascism has come to planet Earth.
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Pretty sure it was already here.
Also, that a private service refusing to do business with certain customers is not it.
What a day (Score:3)
While monetary freedom scares some others embrace (Score:2)
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.
Comparative
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It helps keep us off the blacklists and stay in compliance. We also don't have to worry about an running an open relay or something on accident, all our automated mail goes through sendgrid.
We use O365 for regular email.
Privacy Violation (Score:2)
Pretty sure they can't discern mere discussion of it versus sale of it unless they're violating your privacy and reading every single one, given machine learning with regards to context is highly lacking.
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Is it really a 'violation' for a mass emailing service to read what you want them to send? I'd think it's expected, similarly with a newspaper reading an ad you want to place.
Nothing of value lost (Score:1)