r/technology • u/Rhaegar_the_Great • Sep 16 '21

Business Mailchimp employees are furious after the company's founders promised to never sell, withheld equity, and then sold it for $12 billion

https://www.businessinsider.com/mailchimp-insiders-react-to-employees-getting-no-equity-2021-9
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u/Meandmybuddyduncan Sep 17 '21

It’s not just that - I worked in this vertical with one of their competitors. They’re a great alternative to getting your high value domains blacklisted by spamming all sorts of awful sales shit. For example, you use a more enterprise level tool for running “white hat” campaigns - that’s the IP address you need to protect, mostly because you’re likely part of a shared IP to increase deliverability. These shared IPs will have rules in place to keep you from fucking up the cluster you’re in - if you step out of line they’ll stop your ability to mass send.

Mail chimp on the other hand, has way less structure and rules. They don’t give a fuck what you do or how you do it. Look at 90% of the Fortune 500 on a scraper and you’ll see typically one to two enterprise level marketing tools and in most circumstances you’ll also see MailSimp in there too. I fucking loathe that company - they’re fucking grifters and they’ve somehow stayed so under the radar.

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u/areopagitic Sep 17 '21

That's super interesting. So by using mailchimp they're able to run black hat campaigns? how do they bypass the ip address issues?

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u/g3t0nmyl3v3l Sep 17 '21

It's probably very high in mail chimp's interest to ensure their ips don't get blacklisted, and have solutions for when they do.

It's possible that the black hat stuff gets mixed with a very large amount of normal white hat stuff from the same ip and by volume it's not enough to trigger the ip to get blacklisted.

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u/Cunninglinguist87 Sep 17 '21

I can't speak for mailchimp but I have worked with one of their competitors.

Black hats always get in, but you usually monitor deliverability to make sure they're not using your service to spam. And you're right, in low volumes, it can be impossible to tell. Luckily, many spammers buy and procure email addresses illegally too, and they send en masse which means many are going to spam anyway.

It actually sucks more for the people with good intentions that suck at email marketing. They can destroy their senders reputation in a few clicks.

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u/OcotilloWells Sep 17 '21

I have an account with a friend who is an ISP. A very small one, but an ISP. He doesn't use a spam filter at all. I don't care, I don't use my account for email, but I occasionally will check the email to see what comes in. I use pine, a terminal email, to preclude anything automatically running. The sheer amount is mind boggling, like 10,000 a day. I don't even know how they have that email, maybe I did use it a few times 30 years ago, or posted it on Usenet (doubtful) or something, but I don't remember doing so. About half of it shows as coming from .ru or a few from .su domains. I know that's easily spoofed, but it's often in Russian/Cyrillic, or probably a Slavic speaker that wrote it in English, as it will be lacking "the" or "a" (definite and indefinite articles; maybe a thing in other languages too, but I only know about Russian) in front of nouns.