We’ve been working on a cool new image editor in MailChimp, and so were digging through server logs to try to predict what its usage will be. While we had the hood open, we thought we’d grab (and share) some other interesting MailChimp stats:

• We have 1.2 million users in 158 countries. That’s quite a growth curve since going freemium in 2009 w/100k users.
• Those MailChimp users upload an average 472,000 images per day.
• We serve about 115 million of those images per day (using about 3.5TB of daily bandwidth)
• Currently, we run MailChimp on 117 servers. 134 total, counting all our different services and products.
• We send between 80-100 million emails per day (using 3.29TB of bandwidth per day)
• Our servers track an average 20,305,881 email opens per day.
• We track over 4 million clicks per day

As described in our v6.7 release, we launched some updates to our video merge tags. For those who don’t know about them, our video merge tags are little snippets of code that look like this:

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

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Every once in a while a MailChimp customer will ask me, “Hey, MailChimp’s been great for keeping in touch with my loyal customers. But is there any way to buy or rent an email list from you guys, so I can promote my business to potential customers in my area?” That’s when I explain to them the perils of purchased emails, and the virtues of organically growing a permission-based list. I also tell them they could just look around for other local merchants who might have newsletters (or similar publishers in their industry), then partner with them. In the back of my mind though, I’ve always dreamed of creating a tool for MailChimp customers to make that process easier.

That tool would analyze your list, then scour the vast database of MailChimp customers, looking for similar publishers to recommend. But this idea has been on the back burner for years, because such a tool would require 1) a vast database of MailChimp customers, and 2) the ability to analyze it–fast. Well, going freemium back in 2009 kinda helped with requirement #1. We’re at 1.2 million users, and manage over 800 million email subscribers for them all. And launching our Email Genome Project helped with requirement #2.

Helloooooo, serendipity. Finally, we have all the pieces we need to build Wavelength: a MailChimp service that uses a massive amount of email data to help you find publishers who share something in common with you:

Wavelength doesn’t help you send a promotion to another list, and it definitely doesn’t give you other lists or email addresses. It simply shows you screenshots of other newsletters that some of your subscribers read. The goal is to help you contact those publishers and maybe form a relationship with each other. Ideally, you can link to each other and help each other grow your lists organically.

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Last week, we had some hardware failures at our US1 data center that affected about 400,000 users (here’s the blog post with all the related updates). Today I want to post an announcement about some upcoming server maintenance that’s related to that outage, plus provide a little followup to what happened.

Planned Downtime: January 22, 1am ET

First, we’re doing some server maintenance at our US1 data center on Sunday, January 22nd at 1am ET (see this in your timezone). The maintenance will require downtime, but should only last a few minutes. During those few minutes, MailChimp will not be available for US1 users at all. Their campaign links will not work, nor will new subscribes be tracked. Again, it should only be a few minutes before everything’s back online. This upgrade will basically help us rebound faster should a similar outage occur again (heaven forbid).

So what exactly happened that day?

To recap, last year we invested in super fast SSD equipped servers to handle our increasing traffic. They helped us handle a TON of load, and sped things up nicely through the holidays. Then on January 2nd, several of those servers just up and died all at once–for no apparent reason at all. It just didn’t make any sense, and we’ve never experienced anything like this before. We admittedly didn’t spend much time investigating the cause, because we were busy taking out those SSDs and replacing them with 15k rpm SAS drives (plus a bunch more RAM).

Then a few days later, we saw this news: 64GB Crucial M4s crashing after 5,000 hours, fix coming

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We’re launching some new features in MailChimp today (we’re at v6.7, if anyone’s tracking that kinda stuff). The new features should be completely rolled out to all 1.2 million users across all data centers by early Friday. We start the new features at our US4 data center, then US1, then US2.

Here’s what’s rolling out:

• Automatic video conversion for RSS-to-Email campaigns
• Discount on MailChimp if you use it with AlterEgo
• Static segments: create segments fast by uploading a list of email addresses
• Daily Deals is now an industry category
• GMT +12 timezone support added. Welcome to MailChimp, Republic of Kiribati!

More details and documentation will be posted soon, but if you’d like a general overview…

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