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.

How Wavelength Works

Basically, Wavelength analyzes your MailChimp list, then compares it to all other MailChimp lists (really, really fast). It looks for subscriber overlap, then recommends similar publishers by showing you screenshots of the email campaigns they’ve sent.

For example, let’s say I own a local pub, and I’d like to find some email newsletter publishers in town to partner with.

I’d go to Wavelength:

and authorize it to connect with my MailChimp account:

Wavelength will ask me which list to analyze, and it’ll ask for some descriptive tags for that list:

Then, it starts thinking:

It usually takes under 20 seconds to compare a list with about 1 million other lists containing 800 million emails.

And in order to deliver the results really fast, we pre-generated over 3 million campaign screenshots in the system (#NBD, as the kids tweet).

Once the analysis is complete, I get screenshots of email newsletters that my customers are also interested in.

They’re listed in order of “similarity” (subscriber overlap):

As one tester put it, this is where you meet all your “email cousins.”

From here, I can drill down to see an archive of past campaigns by each publisher, and then subscribe to any of their lists.

See your subscribers, and maybe even yourself, in a new light

The example scenario above is very typical for what we’ve been finding in our initial tests. You’d think that other local pubs would be listed first, but you’re more likely to find local theaters, beer-related iPhone apps, local coffee shops, etc.

When I ran my various MailChimp lists through Wavelength, I expected to see mostly email marketing or design related results. Instead, I saw that my customers subscribe to newsletters about social marketing tools, CRMs, content management systems, productivity apps, design publications, and newsletters about company culture and innovation.

Here’s a snippet of my newsletter’s wavelength:

But what’s really fun is when I manage different lists in Wavelength, I get some different results. For example, we manage a list that talks about our various giveaways (t-shirts, monkey hats, plushies, etc) that I think is mostly composed of very loyal (and obviously very stylish) MailChimp fans, and the Wavelength for that list looks like this:

Yet another list I set up for an event we hosted in London had a Wavelength like this:

which actually gives me some ideas for other international events to sponsor.

When’s this available?

We plan to open up access to Wavelength in about a month. Why the wait? Well, it scans our system for what it perceives to be public email campaigns, and it makes an attempt to exclude any email campaigns that it thinks are “private” (I’ll explain what that means below). But instead of just relying on algorithms to tell us what to exclude, we thought it’d be good to let our customers manually exclude themselves. We want to give you plenty of time to do that.

Public vs. private email campaigns

MailChimp was built for email marketing, which is an inherently public activity. So what in the world should be considered a “private” campaign, and why would someone use MailChimp to send one?

Usually, it’s an internal company newsletter, or a wedding invitation, or a one-time prize notification or transactional kind of message.  The information in the email is not usually super private or sensitive (email is just not an extremely private medium), but it might be something that you don’t exactly want promoted, or something with expired content. Wavelength will almost always exclude these, because it won’t search lists that were only imported manually, it won’t include tiny lists or fresh new lists, and it won’t show campaigns sent to a segment of a list. For a campaign to be shown in Wavelength, its recipient list must be greater than 200 members, and show signs of being public. Namely, opt-ins were received from its public signup form, or the campaign archive bar (that thingy with all the social sharing buttons) is activated.

But if you want, you can manually override everything, and totally exclude your list from Wavelength searches.

For example, I have my list where customers can sign up for a chance to win a t-shirt. For some reason, I just don’t want this to show up in Wavelength results. Maybe the t-shirt designs are top secret prototypes or something. For that list, I can go to “Publicity Settings:”

And then mark its campaigns as private:

You’ll notice that while we were at it, we combined two other previously released features that have publicity and privacy options (the archive toolbar and the subscriber count chiclets). We figured it’d be nice to consolidate everything in one place.

Using data to make email better

Wavelength is a project I’m happy to finally see the light of day, but we’ve only just begun. In 2011 we brought on a server/devops guy to help us handle all this “big data” and we hired an internal data scientist to analyze that data (here’s some fun stuff he’s found). We’re already heavily using EGP behind the scenes here to prevent abuse and protect the email ecosystem. For example, about a year ago, a hacker stole someone’s identity to create a MailChimp account, then used it to send spam (one reason we’ve added so many security features to MailChimp, and why we make free 2-factor security apps like AlterEgo). After that incident, we analyzed their list and found other accounts that had lists very closely matching the hacker’s:

The “evil doer” is in the center, with similar lists surrounding (users’ names obviously have been obfuscated). See any common theme here? What we found was fascinating. Some of the “similar” accounts were legit users, and some appeared to be accounts that the hackers were in the midst of setting up. But this kind of graph raises questions like, “Why are they all London arts / entertainment organizations? Did they initially steal their list from some London theater? Or did they all scrape their lists from the same source?”  We’re also able to test incoming new accounts for the presence of stolen/purchased/scraped lists (based on data we’ve accumulated from accounts we’ve shut down for abuse), with the goal of keeping our system clean and our deliverability high (and also, you know–protecting email). And most exciting of all (to an email nerd like me), we can use what we’ve learned while fighting abuse to build cool new features like Wavelength that help us improve our email marketing. Who knew math could be so useful?

To be notified when Wavelength goes live, sign up to this list.

For general announcements about our Email Genome Project, subscribe here.

Related reading:

• Fun with data science (and dendrograms): http://blog.mailchimp.com/fun-with-data-science/
• Slightly scary: What happens to email typos? http://blog.mailchimp.com/comacast-and-gmai-all-your-typo-email-are-belong-to-us/
• Pesky tweets from scantily clad fembots: http://blog.mailchimp.com/dealing-with-tweets-from-scantily-clad-fembots/
• MailChimp’s Email Genome Project: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimps-email-genome-project/

At some point, the proprietor of such a card-collecting eatery might pay her angsty nephew to hand jam those email addresses into a spreadsheet. Odds are that one of those addresses is going into that list with a typo. The same thing happens with a single opt-in webform (huzzah for double opt-in).

You might think most of these typo addresses are going to bounce when you send to them, so no big deal—typos are merely a minor annoyance and occasional source of hilariousness. And when they bounce, you’ll just clean them up then.

You’d be mostly right to think that. If you fat-finger the top-level domain, you’re going to get a bounce. If you mess up anything to the left of the @ symbol, chances are you’re going to get a bounce there, too.

But what if you fat-finger the domain? This past month, I was doing some big data wrangling for our Email Genome Project, and I saw something funky going on with fat-fingered domains of large ISPs and freemail providers—specifically, email to these typos wasn’t bouncing. We actually had great delivery to these domains, which was unnerving.

Typosquatting domains sit around sites like Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Comcast, etc., and many of them love to accept all the mail they can get. For example, just in November, MailChimp users successfully sent 100,000 emails to addresses at Gmai.com, Gmial.com, Gmil.com, and 15 other Gmail imposters.

I’m not saying that my doppelganger doesn’t have a gmai.com address, but I’d be willing to bet that while these sites accept all the email sent to them, they deserve slim to none of it.

In November alone, our users sent approximately one million emails to typosquatting domains.

Don’t navigate to these sites, please. I’ve done it for you. The creepy stylins of gmai.com:

It’s mighty good of them to thank you for your typo.

Who owns these sites? Darned if I know. Many of them have anonymized their WHOIS information. What if your doctor fat-fingers the email address your blood work results are going to? The hard-working folks at Gmai.com will know all about your iron deficiency.

Perhaps these sites are collecting email addresses, correcting the typos, and creating lists to sell. That’s bad.

Now that they have your content, they could copy it, correct the typo address, and send a customized phishing attack to one of your subscribers. That’s worse.

Why don’t we correct these typos for you? Even if we could identify all these domains and pass judgment on whether or not a particular email address is intentional, correcting the address gets into permission issues. On a single opt-in list, someone might have intentionally given a bad email address. From a data-science perspective, these typos are an excellent signal of list quality—and they’re useful in “scoring” campaigns before they go out the door (hint, hint).

So look out for typos, and seriously consider going double opt-in. After all, if you’re not careful, you may end up in a coma…cast. *rimshot*

• A better interface to display retweets
• Shows Facebook Likes
• Post to Facebook pages
• Import Facebook Likes
• Improved threading of replies from social networks
• Improved Facebook open graph search for responses
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Complete re-architecture and rewrite to make platform more extensible (easier to add Google+ support, when their API is released)
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Set which accounts (including pages) are checked by default
• New queue system for checking for social comments on posts
• Better support for shortened URLs
• Delay broadcasting comments to social networks until they have been approved
• Delay broadcasting future posts to social networks until they have been published
• New authentication scheme for improved security
• Smart detection of retweets as understood by humans (where possible)
• Check for social comments via admin bar
• Check for social comments via posts list screen
• Added “time until next check” (in a human friendly format) to the social comments box for each post
• Allow editing of social broadcast messages for scheduled posts
• Directly imported tweets (by URL) are approved immediately (not held for moderation)
• Don’t import private tweets as comments
• Refactored personal vs. global broadcasting accounts, with defaults available for each
• Improved admin UI

We’re pretty excited about this update as it makes a plugin that we already loved even better. Oh, and Social is open source. You can fork it on Github and make your own contributions.

download Social 2.0 for WordPress

Fork Social 2.0 on Github

Goooal is a new way to segment your MailChimp list based on what people do on your website when they visit from an email campaign. Goooal works by installing a tracking pixel on your site, and then adding “Goooals” to the campaign that you want to track. A Goooal could be something like: “If a visitor from my campaign goes to the www.mailchimp.com/party page, then add them to the Party RSVP segment.”

Once a subscriber to your list lands on a page associated with a Goooal, the tracking code sees it and records the hit in our super-duper database. We’ve made a cool results page where you can view the hits to each of your Goooals in real time, so that you can witness the action play by play. Just as a note, the actual process that adds the users to a segment takes a bit longer, since we don’t want to melt down the API each time there’s a new match. Once you’re subscribers have surfed your site a bit and you’ve got some good segments built, you can send targeted content that’s more relevant to their interests.

The thought behind the app is to take something that’s traditionally pretty complicated (Think of Google Analytics funnels and goals) and simplify it enough so that it’s still useful, but within the reach of most mortal humans to operate. We built this app so that you can get some better insight as to what people are looking at on your site, and hopefully figure out what they are interested in. People like hearing about stuff they are interested in.

Goooal works with your existing MailChimp account login, so you won’t have to create yet another account and remember yet another password. It’s free to use, so go give it a try and learn something new about your crowd! If you want to learn more about it, check out the FAQs.

We’re releasing this app as Beta. It should not eat your small pets or your MailChimp data, but please make sure you test your campaigns thoroughly if you plan on using Goooal. As always, get in touch if you see anything funky.

PS: The only thing missing from this is some audio each time you score a Goooal. Don’t worry, we’re on it!

Check out Goooal

When Aarron first introduced OnStage, he ended the announcement with this warning:

We built OnStage quickly and rather than letting it languish in a state of perpetual polishing, we’re launching it today, rough edges and all.

We spent the last few weeks working on OnStage to get rid of those rough edges and introduce a few neat features in the process.

API Keys, no more!

Having to enter your API key every time you wanted to use OnStage was a pain. With our shiny new implementation of Oauth2, you’ll be logging into OnStage with your MailChimp credentials instead. Not only is this much more secure, but it’s so much easier for folks that are constantly using OnStage.

You should find all your previous campaigns, todos, comments, and revisions just like you left them. If you encounter any monkey business, please let us know!

As an added bonus, you should not see as many errors regarding emails already being used for OnStage accounts. We’ve done some reworking of the code to make sure that anyone with any email can collaborate with someone else with OnStage.

Oooh, preetty!

We have a top-notch team of designers and front-end guys. We grabbed a few of them, stuck them in a dark room, and didn’t let them out until we had a beautiful new skin for OnStage. The result is something that is much easier on the eyes, but also contains lots of bug fixes for all the poor souls out there using Internet Explorer.

A few goodies we snuck in there

A broken link in an email campaign is like leaving “sale” advertisements from the month before plastered on the walls of  your store. We’ve now added an easy way to check your links from OnStage just by hovering over a link. You’ll get a nice tooltip that shows you the URL, which you can conveniently click to open that link in a new window.

A lot of you also were interested in knowing who created each todo. You can now hover over each todo entry to show the name of the creator. For all you interns out there that were getting clever on your todos, your brief period of enjoying the first amendment is now over.

Lastly, we figured it would be useful to be able to see the current password for the campaign without having to click on the email link. Hover over the “Invite People” menu to reveal the current password. If you click on the link, the password will be selected for you, ready for a quick CMD + C (or CTRL + C for you Windows people).

We’ve got plenty of  ideas on how to make OnStage great, but we can’t do it without your help and feedback. Let us know what you love, what you hate, and what’s missing so that we can continue to make OnStage better. We hope it makes your email-sending-world-domination plan just a bit easier on you.

Check out OnStage

Social is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. Through the use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

Through Social, you can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments. Social polls Twitter and Facebook periodically for new comments about your posts, and adds them as comments when it finds a URL reference.

Lots of people use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web. Social lets commenters log in and leave a comment using their preferred social identity. They can also publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account from your blog.

Social intentionally has a broad name. It handles a lot of socially bits in your blog from broadcasting to content aggregating. There are a bunch of other nice things about the plugin, though:

• Automatically adds Twitter hover cards to any Twitter username you drop into posts or that show up in comments
• Let’s you filter between blog comments, tweets, Facebook comments, and trackbacks
• Handles comment thread layout intelligently so you don’t get microscopic widths after four or five replies
• Let’s you manually check for social comments from each blog post edit page, or paste in a tweet URL for a comment if you like
• Easily customizable design by creating your own templates for the plugin

Want to take Social for a spin? Hey, Madge. You’re soaking in it. We’ve got it installed right here in the MailChimp blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Social. We tried lots of other plugins that do similar things, but none of them quite fit the bill. So we made our own, and we’re releasing it free for everyone else to enjoy.

UPDATE: Alex King of Crowd Favorite, the development mastermind behind Social, has addressed a lot of the technical details and the roadmap for the plugin over on his blog.

Download Social for WordPress

We just added some new features to AlterEgo, our free 2-factor authentication app that we launched back in May.

These features are similar to the security notifications we’ve built into MailChimp (which you should activate, if you haven’t already). Basically, if you (or someone else) logs in to your AlterEgo account and change your email address or password, we’ll send you an email alert. And if you enter your mobile phone number into AlterEgo, we’ll send you an SMS notification too. For the SMS notifications, we’re using Tropo, which supports international mobile numbers as well. If you haven’t activated 2-factor authentication for your MailChimp account, here’s how.

Chimport Does the “Heavy Lifting”

Chimport Export Window

After you’ve downloaded Chimport from the App Store, log in with your MailChimp API Key. Chimport displays your Address Book groups and contacts. Select the contacts you would like to export, choose a list and click “Export to MailChimp.”

The status bar in the app will tell you how many contacts you’ve exported, how many errors occurred and how many members have been updated. Clicking on the status message will give you a more detailed report if there were errors.

Chimport uploads email, first name and last name from your contact entries to your list. First name and last name will only be uploaded if the FNAME and LNAME merge fields exist on your list, so be sure that they do. If an Address Book contact already exists on your MailChimp list, Chimport will try to update the first and last name fields.

Now that your list has been imported, you might want to take a look at all of MailChimp’s template options. There’s even a way to continue using Apple Mail and Mail’s Stationery to send your campaigns.

Download Chimport on the Mac App Store.

Chimpsterous adds a new "Newsletter" page.

Last week, Federico announced a nice integration for posting a newsletter button to your Tumblr blog. If you have a Posterous site, I’d like to introduce you to Chimpsterous. Chimpsterous mimics MailChimp’s Embedded Signup Form feature and makes it easy for you to add a subscribe form to your Posterous site.

Get Started with Chimpsterous

Posting a MailChimp subscribe form to Posterous will take about 5 minutes. You’ll need:

• Your MailChimp API Key
• Your Posterous Username/Password

After entering your MailChimp API Key, select the list you would like to use. Then enter your Posterous credentials to post the form to your site. Chimpsterous takes care of the rest.

What’s Happening Here

Chimpsterous will create the code for an embedded signup form, create a new page on your Posterous site called “Newsletter” and then publish the new page containing the signup form. The form is generated without CSS styles, so it can pull whatever default styles your theme has already set for forms and form fields. Since the code is embedded in a Posterous page, just log in to your Posterous account to change the title of the page, edit the page heading, description and even the form fields or labels.

I was able to switch to Fluid by MetaLab and my form still looks pretty good.

A Few Notes

Chimpsterous will create the new subscribe form page on your primary Posterous site. You can learn more about primary sites in this Posterous F.A.Q.

Try out Chimpsterous and pick up a few new subscribers for your newsletter.

For those of you who don’t know, Golden Monkeys is a simple little app for stat freaks that sends real time push alerts whenever VIPs (we call them “golden monkeys” here at MailChimp) open and click your emails (you can read the original blog post about it here).

Here’s a breakdown of what’s new…

More Powerful Searching

Previously, you had to search for VIPs on your MailChimp list from within the mobile app. And you could only search by email address. That’s no big deal if you know *exactly* who your VIPs are, and you enjoy sifting through long lists on tiny screens. But this got cumbersome.

So now, we moved the searching process to MailChimp. Just log in to MailChimp like you normally do, click into your list, hit “View all subscribers:”

and then build a segment based on whatever criteria is important to you. Look for the “segment” link to open up the search options:

This changes everything, because instead of entering VIP emails that you already know, you can actually search your MailChimp lists to discover new Golden Monkeys.

For example, you could build a segment of “nearby fans” using our geolocation data and member ratings based on criteria like this:

Or, if you run an e-commerce store and have our eCommerce360 plugin installed, you can segment based on customer purchase activity:

Another advantage to using MailChimp’s search tool is that you can use our bulk add functionality for selecting multiple Golden Monkeys:

For example, if I want to select all members above a certain klout score, I’d bulk add like this:

Boom, I can add all of them as Golden Monkeys in one fell swoop. Note: the bulk add interface will not show any Golden Monkeys options unless MailChimp detects that you’ve installed and setup the app on your mobile device. 

We’ve also added the ability to add someone to your Golden Monkeys list from each subscriber’s “member profile” screen:

There’s a subtle little Golden Monkey icon underneath Jim’s strikingly handsome gravatar (thanks, Jim).

The icon is grayed out when it’s set to off:

and golden when it’s on:

When it’s set to on, that means the Golden Monkey will automatically sync to your mobile device and alert you to email activity.

Updated Activity Screen

We’ve also updated the “Recent Activity” screen to be more of a chronological feed (kinda like Twitter, or our own Chimp Chatter).This way, you can get a nice birds-eye view of all activity from all your Golden Monkeys:

Setup via Camera, Security Settings

We made it a lot easier to get set up, because you can now just snap a picture of your API key’s QR code (we recently added this same setup functionality to Chimpadeedoo2). Using API keys is generally recommended over plugging your username and password in, because it’s a little more secure. If someone were to steal your iPhone, you could log in to MailChimp and revoke the API key. It’s just that API keys are really long, and hard to type on your phone. Snapping a pic with your camera is easy, though.

Choose the API Key login option:

Then snap a pic:

Speaking of API key security, you might also want to activate SMS security alerts in your MailChimp account settings. We’ll TXT you whenever anyone logs in to your account, downloads a list, creates an API key, etc. If you’re interested, check out: MailChimp TXT Security Alerts

Stuff Under Settings

Click the gear icon to get to Golden Monkeys Settings screen:

From here, you can setup a passcode to lock the app. This is a good idea in case your phone is ever stolen.

We’re talking about customer data here, so you should lock this baby down:

You’ll also notice a little Truste privacy badge on the Settings screen:

This is a new service from Truste designed to address concerns specific to mobile apps, and also explains things in an easy-to-digest, mobile-friendly way (with icons and stuff):

We’re proud to be among the first mobile apps to be Truste certified.

v1 Users Must Upgrade

If you’re a current Golden Monkeys v1 user, you’ll need to update the app because v1 will not work anymore after today. Don’t worry, though. Any Golden Monkeys you’ve designated in v1 will show up when you upgrade to v2.

More to come from the Mobile Lab

We’ve come a long way since we first started tinkering with mobile technology. We built an iPhone friendly web app in 2008, then hired Pinch+Zoom to build our big native iPhone app in 2009, and launched it early 2010. By the summer of 2010, it became crystal clear it was time to invest in mobile for the long term. In July, we started our Mobile Lab. Because mobile technology is changing so rapidly (hey, who knew those crazy iPad tablet things would actually catch on?), our strategy was to build apps fast, iterate fast, and learn fast. We launched Chimpadeedoo, Chimpadeedee (on Adobe AIR), Pyow, ChimpKit and ChimpBot (for mobile developers), built our mobile optimized web app, and built ChimpNews as a way to tinker with the Android platform (which was at version 2.2 then, and now we’re already up to version 3.1). Not to mention our mobile-optimized AlterEgo web app (yeah, we’re planning a native app too). Mobile’s changing fast. So we’ve always wanted to stay flexible and just build on top of the MailChimp API (thank goodness we invested so heavily in that department), without committing too much or integrating too much with “MailChimp Proper.” Moving forward, we plan to keep iterating fast, but you’ll see things integrating deeper as our Mobile team works more and more closely with our product team. You’ll also see us launching iPhone and Android apps simultaneously. Exciting times! Our next big project is an update to MailChimp for iPhone and Android. Finally, if you’re interested, the Mobile Lab has a newsletter you can subscribe to (check out their most recent news here).