Mailchimp Blog

(Assuming you mean MailChimp) I don't know anything about how MailChimp operates, but a quick search turns up this blog post about how to set up SPF records [1]. From there, you can get a list of which IPs MailChimp authorizes as a sender; following the SPF include directive, you can see they specify two IPv4 ranges, both of which are in class C space, so it seems unlikely that MailChimp has their own class A for SMTP senders. [1]: https://blog.mailchimp.com/senderid-authentication-for-your-mailchimp-…

I don't think it's as simple as that. This is a data mining exercise - to read our customer's subscribers data and to move from a "dumb pipe" to a "personalization engine". From mailchimp CEO's blog: "We came to a fork in the road, and choosing the “personalized transactional” path with Mandrill suits us and our customers better than the “utility” path." http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

Spot on! However I see inconsistencies with this feature. I found lot of emails in which unsubscribe link at top is present but "List-Unsubscribe" header is not present. Not sure if Gmail is doing this intentionally. MailChimp has also mentioned this inconsistency in their blog. http://blog.mailchimp.com/gmails-new-unsubscribe-link-and-feedback-loo… Read "The new unsubscribe link" heading para 3 Your thoughts?

The thing is - we already have the Facebook (or twitter etc) single login option. However the are plenty of articles that say this form of sign up is not necessarily effective.[1] For this idea to take off - you need to assume the reason for the current lack of uptake is that users dont trust the 3rd party with the Facebook data. However I personally believe, and would have thought, that most people dont trust Facebook with the linked data, since they are learning more about you? [1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

I agree with the article, furthermore here's another interesting reading from Mailchimp, as they reduced their failed logins by 70% telling users if the username or password was wrong: https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

You'll lose a lot of users as people REALLY do not trust social logins anymore due to sketchy security settings in Facebook.[1][2] Anecdotally I actually overheard an older gentlemen behind me at a coffee shop the other day lamenting about how he wanted to sign up for some service but they wanted his facebook login details and that "they posted all over my wall with ads last time and I'm not going through that again." Implementing your own user system isn't all that difficult as most technology stacks have a library to handle password storage. [1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/ [2] http://hyperallergic.com/54018/man-bartlett-why-i-deleted-my-facebook-…

I don't have experience, but I've read this : http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/ . I'm rolling my own signup (which is easy enough in Django), but I'd consider doing a Google login. Facebook & Twitter I wouldn't care to implement: My target audience wouldn't want to be mixing their social logins with my service.

Mailchimp had similar findings, albeit coming from a different angle: http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

MailChimp concluded that social login wasn't worth it. Would be interesting to know how much of their demographic consists of "technical people" https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

Okay, I misremembered a bit. They showed that a tiny portion of people used social login (~3%) and that the gain they thought they'd made with them (fewer forgot password/username issues) was due to an unrelated change. The tiny portion shows that it can't be that important (plus, how many of the 3% that took advantage of it would have left without those buttons?). The study can be found here: http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/ I apologize for the misinformation in my first comment, but I think my point remains. That said, I feel similarly to you - I just think that a much smaller portion of people feel that way than you realize.

This also has the side effect of making your email list have better deliverability. If you consistently have good open rates, Gmail and other email providers tend to mark your content as spam less often. Mailchimp recommends [1] pruning out inactive or "low star" members semi-regularly for this reason. [1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/segmenting-your-email-campaign-based-on-subs…

I have to respectfully disagree with your point re: Mailchimp. They are a company that makes it easier to make email newsletters. Nothing knock your socks off amazing there. But that chimp and the subsequent marketing around it has played a major role in customer loyalty. They recently hit 1M customers and, to celebrate, they gave away plushies, hats, and t-shirts all with the mailchimp theme. And they gave them away quickly. Really says something about customer love and loyalty imo. http://blog.mailchimp.com/one-meeeellion-users/ Also, they do give you the "non-cheeky" option, so there's that. Completely agree re: Feedburner. :)

If you want to read it, the work-around while their blog is down is hop over to Google Reader, click Add Subscription, and paste in the URL of their blog (http://blog.mailchimp.com). This is my go-to work around for accessing blogs which were killed by traffic. But what is the work around for writing blog posts such that they don't get killed by routine events such as showing up on the HN front page? Turn off Apache KeepAlive. Apache KeepAlive is to dead blogs as smoking is to lung cancer: not only does A certainly lead to B if you give it enough time, the existence of B strongly implies A! For more on this topic: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memory-constra…

Probably worth relinking their excellent blog post "Going Freemium: One Year Later" http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/ Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.

As a "user", I love logging in with social media. How awesome is it that I can just click a button and be logged in instantly? No worrying about setting up a password, at least, for most websites. I used to not trust it, but after becoming a developer and learning: it is just grabbing an email or a name is not too bad. Though sometimes, it may grab more than that, such as your friends list, etc. Somehow, that became okay and no one cares. As a "developer", things are quite different. There are a few libraries of code on Github and you can find examples across the Internet. For the most part, these examples do work after you have set up some API backend on the social media platforms themselves. Code would almost seem straightforward. However, it is not always the case, especially, when a social media platform is ever-changing. For example, last week, someone released a new product on Hacker News and went about his way, only to realize, that people were attempting to login to Facebook, which recently upgraded from SDK 4 to SDK 5. Massive changes occurred. How embarrassing to go live, only for one of your social media buttons not to work? It's not his fault, but it's Facebook who updated their code so older versions no longer work. Most developers are trying to focus on their own code and make sure it works. Now they have to worry about potential users being unable to access the front door? When I went to update Facebook SDK 4 to SDK 5 on one of my own platforms, using…

Wow, and on top of everything else, sparkpost just upgraded their free tier from 10k/mo to 100k/mo sends. That's pretty huge, as 100k/month gets you a lot of runway before you need to really start paying for things. Plus, the CEO promises to keep honoring the 100k threshold for anybody who signs up under that plan, even if they have to lower it again in the future. [0]. I'll have to check them out. Of course my real problem at this moment is Mandrill just plain works already, and I'm not sure if it is worth spending engineering time shifting to a different provider instead of just paying the premium. TBH, the biggest issue is the feeling of Impending Doom I get from the mandrill discussion. [1] seems to indicate that the transactional email of mandrill really just doesn't fit in the corporate culture of mailchimp. So it's not just the change in pricing that worries me, I'm concerned about a future where there's a lack of innovation and support in the product itself, and I'm still locked in to paying more for less because I don't want to spend the time moving providers. Sunk costs and all that. 0: https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-sparkpost-pric… 1: http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

In these cases it's really helpful to recognize the distinction between the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), and the broader, open source Mozilla project that binds everyone together. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation exists to support the project, and does truly wonderful, pure work on keeping the Web open. Advocacy, education, grants, etc. They also own the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is in trenches directly competing with other browser vendors to ensure that the project has sufficient influence to fulfill its mission. Persona was housed in MoCo, which afforded it greater resources at the cost of greater organizational risk. > Either Mozilla is full of it when they say they fight for the free web, or they massively misunderstand how important it is to get rid of proprietary authentication. The Mozilla project is too small to fight effectively on every front; we have to focus on areas of greatest urgency and where we have the greatest leverage. In the instance of Persona, two major things changed: (1) Persona became less urgent, and (2) we discovered that we couldn't credibly leverage Firefox to boost Persona adoption. To the first point, back in 2012 we were seeing huge startups, including Spotify and Pinterest, run without offering any means of authentication besides Facebook Connect. The lack of traditional authentication on these sites looked like an ill omen for the freedom of the future Web, but that didn't come to pass. Both…

I think you go freemium if the market is large enough to support the idea that if you just convert a small percentage of customers, you'll still be a successful company. If the answer is yes it's large enough, then whatever strategy gets your software in the hands of the most number of users should be the path you follow. Now, as a startup, I wouldn't start by competing head to head with OpenTable's salesforce going after their customers. That sounds expensive. Also, getting people to switch providers is always way more difficult. Plus, I think people value OT not because of their features but because of the network effect they bring. Don't get me wrong, you'll definitely still be going one-by-one and converting users, but I don't think you should start with those using your competition. Instead start with new restaurants or those not using anything. To them, you'll feel like a miracle. The reason you want to maximize distribution of software and engagement (having something that even the free plan is worth talking to people about) is because going freemium is not unlike investing in startups or building up a portfolio. You invest in your customers in mass (with free features not money) and you hope a small grouping of them will make back that investment many fold. Like investing, freemium works best as a long term strategy. So when you look at your upgrade triggers, be sure not to cripple that free plan so much that you're optimizing for conversion rate for users as…

The latter is a valid question. MailChimp had a post about a year ago [1] where they found that social logins had some negative components. Specifically, that they overall had a lower login rate than the standard username/password. This isn't quite the same, but it IS extra effort for legitimate users to log in. Also, every new login method requires user training. What does the user education process look like if you had to train and support them on (up to) seven different authentication methods? If a user gets used to one of them (say, proximity), how smoothly can you keep them educated that if they are in the subway, GPS won't work, so they need to try /method X/, then /method Y/, etc. That may be worth the effort to some services where security is absolutely paramount; hopefully anyone using this service builds in some heavy analytics to find out! [1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

Odd then that MailChimp had to make extensive modifications to comply with GDPR. https://blog.mailchimp.com/gdpr-tools-from-mailchimp/

Every major email provider and sender already does that. That's table stakes, along with a dozen other things, that's required or else your network will be 99% spam (if it gets any kind of volume, that is). See https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-how-they-wor…

From MailChimp's second post[1]: > More and more business owners are bringing up double opt-in. What they’ve been saying is that double opt-in is not an easy journey for their customers. Some go so far as to say that double opt-in is “broken.” I would go so far as to say if customers cannot be bothered clicking one confirmation link in an email, they didn't really care about your newsletters. [1] https://blog.mailchimp.com/why-single-opt-in-and-an-update-for-our-eu-…

I don't believe this is correct. Gmail will only request an image to proxy once you've opened the email, according to MailChimp, so this would only prevent tracking multiple opens. http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-tracki…

Mandrill isn't going to be available standalone by the end of the month. http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

Well the official answer was "this change isn’t driven by profit–it’s about aligning our culture and core competencies with our core customers’ needs. There are many people who use Mandrill as a (free) utilitarian infrastructure service, who are not our core customers, and who deserve to use a company that’s better set up for that in the long run." https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#comment-3356…

I wonder in what Venn diagram do the sections of "People who need newsletters" and "People who do transactional emails" overlap that much that this really makes sense? There's also a blogpost about this by the founder: http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/ (side note: comments seem to be open there but when posting there, first I got a "you are posting too quickly", then trying again it went into moderation)

Yep indeed it's faulty: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-track…

It is normally an image like others have said, however, Google's caching inside gmail is causing some problems: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-track… So I would say it is not 100% anymore, but, no alternative approach is out there either.

Clarification, https://blog.mailchimp.com/opt-in-vs-confirmed-opt-in-vs-double-opt-in… http://support2.constantcontact.com/articles/FAQ/1586. I'm not sure why it is not credible to use the term double opt-in, please explain.

So thats what those are! I started noticing these buttons last week with my subscriptions. Looks like Mailchimp wrote a blog post about it too - http://blog.mailchimp.com/gmails-inbox-actions-work-with-mailchimp/