Also, if I could be anecdotal for now too, I’ll say that we have no single customer “doing hundreds of thousands in business.” Unless you’re referencing list size. I want to make that point because it’ll help explain what I’m about to say below.

You say that we “continue to reinstate” this customer, despite “massive spam complaints.” That’s a 2-part issue I’d like to address:

Re: How we reinstate: If an account gets suspended, our (human) review team investigates. Then they decide to reinstate or not. They don’t take financials into consideration. We’re not an ESP that has a handful of clients who pay tons of money. We’re the opposite. We have hundreds of thousands of users who each pay small amounts. Because of those financials, our compliance team is not incentivized or motivated in any way to treat high-paying customers any differently. If anything, the bias would work the opposite way you expect — some large senders who’ve “had their way” at other ESPs tend to think they can send whatever they want from MailChimp, and that we’ll go apologize and make amends with the ISPs on their behalf. It gets annoying. Instead, we suspend their accounts or shut them down completely, and many of them are very surprised by that. So yeah, if there were a bias, it’d be against larger senders. But there’s no bias. We look at abuse stats. Not money.

Also, I took a quick look at your MailChimp account (well, what I presume to be your account, based on the domain you used for this comment) and it looks as though our system has sent you some automated warnings, and our human review team has worked with you and reinstated you multiple times. Everybody gets automated warnings. They tend to spook some people, so we’ve calibrated the message to seem less “your account is getting permanently shut down” and more “This is just a heads-up” but if we go too far in that direction, people don’t take them seriously. I *will* say that if trends only get worse over time, the account will probably face shut down, but our team will tell you in advance of that. It’s only when the system detects something extremely bad that an account is permanently shut down automatically.

Re: the “after massive spam complaints” part: If an account received massive spam complaints, it would be automatically shut down (as described above). It’s possible this sender has a large list in comparison to you, but the percentage of allowed complaints is the same. Actually, smaller lists get a slightly more lenient percentage of allowed complaints.

If the domain name that you used for this comment is the same as your website, there’s something broken in your process. Because I just subscribed to your list, and there’s no double opt-in confirmation. It’s single opt-in. And in the single opt-in confirmation email, there’s no option to unsubscribe. That could be part of the problem. I also noticed on that particular website that there’s a big giant “Enter your email to proceed” box on the home page. This implies that I can’t get past this screen in order to take advantage of your deals *unless* I plug in my email address. When people do this (and daily deal sites are increasingly going down this path to increase their list size) they experience ongoing deliverability and abuse problems. This is simply because people are just going to enter fake email addresses into that field (steve@apple, bill@microsoft, etc). And of course the IT groups at Apple, Microsoft, Hotmail, Me.com, etc. are going to automatically blacklist any sender that sends anything to those addresses (they’re called spamtraps). I noticed on this particular website that you do have a link that allows people to skip past the “enter your email” box, but instead of labeling it “no thanks, I’ll subscribe later” it’s labeled, “I’m already a member, let me in!” I know you’re not doing that to deceive people and make them think they *must* signup to proceed. You’re probably doing that just for members to quickly navigate past that screen (though it seemed to cookie me after I became a member). I’m just saying that for first-time visitors, they may not see any way to browse before signing up. So they’ll naturally just plug in fake emails.

And that’s going to lead to ongoing problems.

We have double opt-ins, we have in-person signups, we send automated welcome emails with unsubscribe opps, we send emails with multiple reminders of why they gave us their email, an unusb at the top, unsub at the bottom, and regularly prune/purge our lists of those under 3 stars. People consistently don’t open our emails? Gone! Strange looking email? Gone! Signed up during some kind of special promotion? GONE! What more can we do to police the list except delete it and start over. We did that too. And now we’re going to have to switch ESPs.

Strengths: It is superior in design, ease of use, and cost.

Weaknesses: One bad apple and kiss your program good bye. Sometimes, 4.4% could be 1 or 2 people. The numbers we received back were always that low, just a person or two. We tried several attempts to keep within their guidelines, but ultimately, in fear that the next newsletter was going to get rejected, we decided to move on.

To mailchimp. I completely respect your desire to have a near flawless record. But, why won’t you open a “mailgorilla” site for professionals that is a little more flexible than mailchimp? Don’t give it for free at all, make it pay only. If you continue to not make mailchimps’s standards, push them to mailgorilla…and if they can’t keep those standards, then kick them out. I don’t care what anyone says, its extremely hard to keep up with the standards of mailchimp if you are a business. Even if you know you aren’t spamming, its next to impossible to keep that record.

Here’s to hoping one day a mailgorilla comes about!

SB