When you import a list into MailChimp, we reject any “role” addresses that might be on the list. I’m talking about emails like webmaster@, info@, sales@, etc. Instead, we’ll give you a message that looks like this:
so if you have role addresses on your account that you know should receive your email marketing, we make you manually input those addresses.
That’s because role addresses are built for functions, not people…
In other words, they’re often forwarded to multiple employees in a company, and they often change owners. So it’s pretty obvious how sending your newsletter to a role address can lead to spam complaints that jeopardize the deliverability of our system. We even have a handy “tell me more” link to our knowledge base explaining all this, just in case. And manually inputting role addresses is a lot easier than manually begging to get off blacklists. Yet people still complain about having to manually input role addresses.
I think I know why. Even though we explain the reason for doing what we do, we offer no handy tips on how they can solve their problem quickly and easily.
So here’s a way you can deal with this. It’s not going to be super quick and easy, but if you really want those role addresses on your list, and if you really care about deliverability, it’s worth it.
After you import your list into MailChimp, and we provide you with a list of the rejected role addresses, download that list to your computer.
Next, go to the Lists page in MailChimp, and click on the “forms” link for that list you just created:
at the top of the next page, you’ll get a link to your MailChimp-hosted signup form:
Copy that URL.
Now go to your email program and BCC that link to the small handful of subscribers that you know are real human beings and that truly want your email marketing, but who insisted on using a role address when they originally subscribed to your list. I’m assuming it’s a handful. If it’s thousands of role addresses, (where BCC’ing is not a possibility), we’ve got a deeper problem here. Omnivore is likely to shut down your account, because a high percentage of role addresses pretty much smells like a purchased email list.
Anyway, send that handful of addresses a personal note from your own desktop email program, with your own email address as the reply-to, and using your own ISP or company mail server to distribute the message. If the prospect of dealing with the spam complaints and delivery issues that arise from mass-BCC’ing is bothering you now, then yeah—now you know why we feel the way we do about role addresses and preventing abuse complaints.
But if it’s just a handful of people you know, and who are already used to receiving emails from you, everything will be just fine.
Use a personal note like this:
Hello friends, customers, and subscribers.
I’m moving my email marketing to a product called MailChimp. Yeah, the name’s funny and all, but it’s actually a super powerful tool that will make my life a lot easier, and get useful content to you more efficiently and reliably.
Anyway, you signed up to my list a while back using your company’s role address. Something like “sales@” or “webmaster@”
Problem is, MailChimp won’t let me use that role address, because your company might be forwarding incoming mail to multiple people. Furthermore, those people will often change departments. It’s this philosophical thing they have. I dunno.
So this means that if you want to continue receiving my awesome content, please subscribe to my list using your own, individual email address.
Here’s the link to sign up:
[link to your MailChimp signup form]
Regards,
__________
You might even consider customizing your welcome emails to include some kind of free prize, or free useful resource (like a whitepaper, PDF guide, whatever). That way, in the letter above, you can actually give people an incentive to go through “all that work” of signup up to your list again. Hopefully, your content’s so darn good, they’ll gladly go sign up, regardless of prize (but people still like those prizes!).
Again, we understand that this creates work for you, the publisher, and also work for that handful of recipients who signed up with role addresses. But over the years we’ve seen a lot of people get into a lot of trouble sending emails to role addresses that forward to someone who never signed up for anything.
It’s an unbelievable hassle proving your innocence to all the parties involved. You have to explain your situation to your ESP, the recipient who’s complaining, any ISP abuse desks that are blocking you, and that anti-spam organization that’s now globally blocking all emails that contain your company’s domain name (no matter where or who the emails are sent from).
Trust us. We know it’s an inconvenience, but when it comes to email marketing, an ounce of abuse prevention is worth a pound of role addresses.
I would have to look it up, but I have gotten dinged by this where a person’s last name was considered a role. I want to say I had a contact who’s last name was Press, so the email would be press@___, it made me laugh, I had to manually enter it in, but as you mentioned, it rarely happens and usually when it dings it, it is indeed a role email, but once in a blue moon it is a person with a role/last name…
Oh yeah I thought of the other example, sometimes we have people that have their own domain space and only have role based emails. For example Joe Smith has his own domain space so he only gives out the email info@joesmith.com or something like that, I have seen that a few times as well… Especially since our typical recipients are scientists/tech type people…
Yes, and Joe has a right to set himself up with only a role account. But inevitably, Joe ends up going nearly insane because of all the spam he gets to info@, and instead of setting up joe@, he just starts screaming at the top of his lungs, clicking the “this is spam” button, and then, ironically, forwards that unwanted email (that he signed up for with his role address) to the abuse@ role addresses at mailchimp, our data center, the FTC, the FCC, his lawyer, the U.S. Senate, and on and on, thereby creating even more role address spam. We’re not going to jeopardize the deliverability of our entire infrastructure for Joe.
Joe is pretty much a trouble maker that way….
LOL. I was thinking about replying to you to make sure you knew I was snarking back at *Joe* and not you. But looks like you know that. Thanks!
My company is a vertical-specific website builder and host. My customers and target market are all innkeepers.
The great majority of these solely use role-based email address (e.g. info@, reservations@). They don’t keep multiple addresses and aren’t tech-savvy enough to create and manage multiple addresses.
I am about to pull the trigger on a MailChimp implementation project with one of your recommended consultants (Creative Media Farm). This has me second-guessing.
I know the reasoning, but I’m concerned that this becomes pretty much unusable for me.
I worry that I’ve imported multiple lists (from existing opt-in mailers if mine) and never seen a rejection page, or even a “import finished page” Makes me wonder if I’m not doing the import right. When do you see this warning?
It would be good to see this as an opt out feature, by default is applied, but would allow for being overridden on a per import basis.
People shouldn’t be penalized for using role based email addresses, when in their case using role based email address is their best solution for email manangement.
(BTW, your “notify me of followup comments via e-mail” option is missing an ‘n’ on ‘notify’)
I understand the reasons, but the implementation sucks. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for having a whole bunch of email addresses that are role base din a list and wanting to import them.
As has been pointed out, plenty of real people use role based email addresses. Say I have a list of email addresses, thousands of them, that I have built up over years, perfectly legitimately, and I decide to give Mailchimp a go. But I can’t because a quarter of my legitimate email addresses can’t be imported.
Taking the hard line is fine in some situations if you need to protect yourself, but I’m sure a creative company like Mailchimp can think of a more amenable solution to this. At the moment they are just stubbornly refusing to budge, whilst shouting, “it’s not us that’s wrong, it’s you!”
I have to agree with the above user complaints. Some organizations (ours included) have seminars and workshops targeted specifically at sales/human resources/marketing departments. Our members pay us to let them know whenever we have these events (since it makes no sense to pay us to provide these workshops and not notify them), and it only makes sense to keep a list of role-based addresses.
I hope the brilliant MC staff can find a better solution to this problem.
Just to clarify: I understand and agree with the reasons stated; just not with the solution.
I admire the ideal, but the forced implementation is just unacceptable for many people. I was about to spend some money on MailChimp but now I’m searching for alternatives.
There’s a big flaw in this approach (apart from the slightly nannying nature of it).
We work for a UK Government agency that advises small businesses on broadband, and have a databse of several thousand small businesses and sole-traders who have actively subscribed to receive relevant information to help them in the running of their businesses.
The nature of small businesses is that they tend to have single mailboxes, which also tend to be role-based (info@ sales@ etc) Those mailboxes are actually the personal email of the business owner (who also tends to be the sales, marketing, admin person etc rolled into one)
Consequently our list has over 1500 role-based emails that are actually individuals not roles. I’m more than a little worried that even if I spend several hours uploading these emails my account will be shut down for “smelling of a bought list”!!!
This issue makes MailChimp all but unsuable for anyone – like government business agencies – who deals with large numbers of small and single-owner businesses.
Rather than pre-emptive strikes against would-be spammers, it would make much more sense to simply see if someone is getting dozens of unsubscribes from role-based emails and then block their account.
You’ve lost our business as a result of this – and I imagine a lot more as well. I’d strongly recommend reviewing this.
I’ve actually wasted a lot of time setting up an unusable account, and wish this big flaw was better known – we will certainly be advising the businesses on our database to think twice about using MailChimp – once we find a more forward-thinking alternative and can actually send out our Newsletter to the people who asked for it.
Thanks for the input, John. FTR, if someone with a role address wants to opt-in to your list, we don’t block them. Their double opt-in confirmation proves their permission, and being a role address doesn’t penalize you once they’ve opted-in. It’s only at the time of mass import (by the list administrator) that we block role addresses and require manual import. If you spent a lot of time manually importing addresses, and they don’t complain, we don’t penalize you. But if you spend a lot of time manually importing them one-by-one, and they still complain about your emails, then yes, we’d indeed penalize you. But the issue there would be a larger one, of permission or proper setting of expectations. While not perfect for everyone, this does help protect our system of abuse.
Hi Ben,
I think John’s concern about him being penalized for the number of role addresses was in response to the following paragraph in the blog post:
” I’m assuming it’s a handful [of role addresses]. If it’s thousands [...], (where BCC’ing is not a possibility), we’ve got a deeper problem here. Omnivore is likely to shut down your account, because a high percentage of role addresses pretty much smells like a purchased email list.”
As another user said, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for having a large amount of role addresses, and BCCing 1,500 addresses (like John’s case), let alone manually importing them, is simply not practical. I believe both users and potential MC users are frustrated, above all, because they see a hard-line that seems adamant to consider searching for other solutions (which I believe must exist).
Here is a simple proposal, that, while not ideal, might serve as a starting point:
Role addresses will now have a “verified” flag. When you mass import a list, all role addresses have the ‘verified’ flag off. MC users will only be entitled to email unverified role addresses ONCE, until they are verified by the person on the other side. In this single email (which might even be a template of sorts, designed by MC staff), the MC user can write a short email basically along these lines:
Hello [email address/company/department/first name if available],
We’ve recently outsourced our mass-mailing to an awesome service called MailChimp. This is great news for you for two main reasons: first, you get fine-grained control over the content you receive from us; and second, we get feedback about how you react to our content, which helps us make it better, and more relevant to your interests.
It seems someone in your company (maybe you, or maybe the previous owner of |*EMAIL*|) chose to recieve our newsletter. However, we would like to make sure this is still the case. So, if you are still interested in receiving our newsletters (click this link if you want to see previous editions), please click the following link:
[link that turns on the 'verified' flag]
If you are not interested, please disregard this message, we apologize for troubling you, and rest assured that you won’t hear from us again.
Have a great day!
Cheers,
A Law-abiding MailChimp User
I’m now in the process of manually inputting 1,500 subscribers who chose to give “role-based” addresses as their point of contact. Marvellous!
I’m a little surprised that MailChimp hasn’t caught on to what many people are saying here – that for a very large number of small businesses, role-based emails are the only emails and definitelty are people.
The irony is that “Joe” outlined above is much, much more likely to label an email from me spam if I send it to his personal email (which he keeps for friends and family) than if I send it to the role-based email he has specifically asked me send my newsletter to.
I just think there’s a lack of understanding about how small businesses operate here – which is a little worrying.
Role adresses are people.
I am a webmaster at a medium sized company. Many of our clients are small companies and therefore have only one email adress. I just checked and there are over 6000 info@ emailadresses in our contacts database.
I was hoping to have found an easy to use solution for our not so techni people so that they can handle their email mailings by themselves.
Pity but because of this restriction, I’ll have to look elsewhere.
Did you find a solution? We need to send out usernames and passwords to 3000 customers and around 1200 of them are role addresses. Please let me know how we can solve this problem?
Thanks
Jacob
We did find a solution – and here is the big flaw in what MailChimp are trying to do.
We wrote a very simple script that allowed automated upload via an Excel spreadsheet, allowing several thousand role-based addresses on our database to be added one at a time without someone having to type them in.
Now, every email on our database is from someone who has subscribed so there is no suggestion that we are trying to spam anyone.
However, any spammer worth their salt could write this script in 10 minutes – meaning that the safety feature MailChimp have in place is absolutely no obstacle to spammers but is a right pain in the backside for legitimate businesses trying to communicate with the high percentage of businesses signed up to their mailings using a role-based address.
Good intentions, clumsy execution. As it often the case with attempts to impose blanket restrictions in the name of security, the real crooks know the ways round it, Joe Public is the one who gets inconvenienced.
Jake, we’re not trying to stop spammers. We’re trying to stop people from importing email addresses that consistently cause deliverability issues for the rest of our users. Since instituting our policy, it’s helped cut down on spam complaints tremendously.
But Ben – and you never responded to my comment below on this – you have a flaw in this system: you indicated below that UPDATES to role-based addressed should be allowed by import – because they have initially been added individually. But this is NOT the case – updates are also rejected, which makes no sense. And BTW I got an unsatisfactory canned response about this from your support team, who you explicitly told us below to contact about this update issue.
Hi Phil,
When I open up WordPress to respond to comments, I basically see a chronological stream of comments to a bazillion different articles we’ve written over the years. Often, I respond very quickly, w/out having a lot of time to go back and read the original context of each individual discussion. I can only vaguely remember the overall discussion and sentiment to this post, which is, “we hate this policy.”
Sorry if it looks like I ignored your comment.
So to back track, you commented about something more specific. You pinpointed what you think is a flaw, in that updates to role addresses that have already manually submitted are not accepted. I personally think that’s a flaw too. But I don’t have the mental capacity that our developers do (there are often edge case scenarios that I never think of), so the best I can do is go ask them (politely) if this is indeed a flaw, and if so, could they pretty-please work this into the roadmap to get fixed. Which I’ve done.
The lack of a resolution to what is not a small issue speaks volumes to Mail Chimp support and compassion for their users. You’re suggestions so far just aren’t applicable in most cases where the list is large.
I simply don’t recommend Mail Chimp anymore and its a pity because the UI is a great example of UI done right!
A bit late into this discussion, but I’ve got to agree with what seems to be the general consensus – the intentions are good, but the implementation displays an odd lack of understanding, given the clear understanding demonstrated at every level of the rest of the MailChimp system…
“That’s because role addresses are built for functions, not people…”
…is technically correct, but in the real world a little unrealistic. People *should* use role addresses for functions, but they regularly do not. Role addresses are ubiquitous across SMEs, and making it hard for SMEs to use MailChimp seems like shooting your target market in the foot…
We have a real problem with this in the U.K, since we deal in the majority with small business of 2-10 employees. Of 4,500
subscribers nearly 1,500 are role based, info,sales & admin being their main or only email address.
Having had to enter a bunch of known customers manually (after you rejected them), this is my least favorite big-brother feature of Mail Chimp.
Other commenters are right about small businesses using them.
I have their phone numbers and physical addresses, maybe I could just call the clients of my client and get them to realize that “role addresses are built for functions, not people…”?
Or maybe I should just tell my client, oh, sorry, we can’t email some of your paying customers any more.
It was a nasty surprise after bragging on you to such an extent that it would be hard to switch.
These are all valid points, but the alternative is to risk getting your client blacklisted or blocked by spam filters for sending to an entire sales@ team. It’s much harder to explain why gmail or aol or yahoo is no longer accepting *any* of their emails, just because of one client who signed up with a role address.
Another comment.
I recently have sent an emailcampaign to a list bought by the company I work for. Of course it came with a dozen pages about privacy and legislations.
The most interesting thing was: In Belgium people are allowed to sent emails to role adresses without an opt-in.
Just you might want to know.
Thanks. A few weeks ago, a very old user on our system, who imported his list before we implemented this policy, sent to a role address that ultimately got 60 of our IP addresses blocked by a major anti-spam organization. We were able to get delisted the next day, but not w/out slowing the system down as we re-routed outgoing email around those IPs. We will not allow role addresses to be mass imported into MailChimp.
Well, I am a web designer, and it is usually my job to setup email addresses for all my clients.
I always steer them to use “role based” email addresses such as info as it is more general and specifically receives ALL emails to that domain… i mean, info is a non threatening address to send to for general inquiries, wheres as a sales address or a personal name seems like you would be hassling someone for just a general inquiry.
So all of my client sole point of email contact are info@ addresses, and therefore huge chucks of legitimate users on the list are being barred from import… this is just madness? how can you assume that a role based email is not just a persons account, but a group? this is poor planning from mailchimp in my opinion…..
We’re saying role addresses should not be mass-subscribed to email marketing lists. If you know that an info@ address is one person, and the role address will *never* be changed to point to another person (such as when your client’s business grows, and they assign that duty to someone else), and you know that the new recipient will *not* report the email as spam and get the IP blacklisted, thereby jeopardizing the deliverability of our network for hundreds of thousands of customers, then yeah — we have a manual import option for that role address. You just can’t mass import thousands of them into our system.
We setup and assign lots of role addresses here at MailChimp. We just never, EVER subscribed them to email marketing lists. And when we receive any email marketing to one of those role addresses, we know it’s spam. And we report it as spam (actually we mostly contact the sender and tell them they shouldn’t have mass-emailed their entire address book like they did).
Appreciate your taking the time to give us your feedback, but deliverability is a complicated issue with lots of players (ISP abuse desks, anti-spam organizations, blacklists, and on and on).
Silly rule for sure. We deal with about 30% small business. All of these guys like to use sales@ or info@ because it makes them look “big”.
This might just be a deal killer for us. We went from Constant Contact, to Ratepoint and thought we had found the best when we discovered Mailchimp. This is ludicrous though.
:(
I have to second Chris’s comment. Our website is a matching site for freelancers and about 20% of our users (as I just found out) have role based addresses and are rejected by MailChimp. Surely, there must be something easier than now getting a student to import all of them (thousands).
After reading these posts I feel like the mailchimp folks are not understanding or hearing the issues users are having. My company deals with developers, MANY of these have a me or mail @theirname.com address, and these are all rejected. It should be obvious by now that depending on the market many of the mailchimp users have this issue. I can understand blocking them initially, but then give us a bulk import function. Now I am stuck manually importing a ton of emails that are valid and linked to one person.
I understand the urge to have a spam free system, especially if you run a company like MailChimp.
Imho, that is just one step to far.
This is not the usual 80/20 kind of deal… I think of this more of a 50/50.
But, you will have evaluated the numbers of customers you have, that own lists with so called `role` addresses. If you can accept this potential drop out rate, good for you.
If I have any bigger troubles in future newsletters with this amazing new feature, I’ll change to another mailing provider. Sorry, but the manual import solution for role addresses is just not acceptable.
Best regards, Lukas Rieder
I strongly disagree with the statement that “Role addresses are not subscribers”. When it comes to Business to Business marketing role based addresses are subscribers. MailChimp is a great tool and on face value very cost effective but if we factor in the cost of manually adding email addresses then it really kills it as a tool we can widely recommend to our client base.
You must appreciate that for SME’s a lot of data collection is done physically rather than electronic, through networking, exhibitions and telephone conversations.
I can see your argument for Business -> Consumer marketing but for Business -> Business I think your argument falls flat. If your argument was based on whats best for MailChimp as a business then its fair enough but claiming Role addresses are not subscribers is not accurate.
Our company imports a large number of constantly changing custom fields into the mailchimp mailing lists from our proprietary customer management database. We have manually entered the “role address” email addresses as required, but when we go to re-import the remaining custom fields then your import routine just skips by those email addresses. I understand your not ADDING role address emails during an import. But would it not be reasonable that if we have complied with your rules by already manually entering the email addresses that a reimport with the “auto-update my existing list” checkbox checked would still allow those extra fields associated with the email address to be automatically imported?
Are you constantly importing new lists? Those are going to be treated new every time. There is no “memory” of prior approval with new lists. Those are assumed to be fresh new lists, with different permission history, etc.
Or, are you updating existing lists? If so, they shouldn’t require re-approval. Contact our tech support team if you’d like them to investigate more thoroughly. http://blog.mailchimp.com/support/
The list of email addresses themselves stays the same. I am only updating the additional custom fields that change regularly. I did contact support and they just brushed off my enquiry with a blanket “we do not support role addresses” reply.
Ben – per your reply to Dean on this subject – I just conducted a support chat and was told that even updating role-based addresses is not supported, contrary to what you imply here. This makes no sense at all and is a showstopper for our use of MailChimp. I understand the prohibition against importing role-based addressses – I don’t like it, but I appreciate your commitment to deliverability. But once a role-based address has been manually added, there is absolutely no logic to preventing it from being updated via an import. This would mean so much extra work for us – manually dealing with over 100 entries every single time we refresh our list from our MS-CRM database – that we will have to take our business elsewhere. (And BTW we are an industry association with over 2,000 members – our recommendation could mean hundreds of new customers for you.) Please – can this update behavior be changed?? (Also, I’m not looking for the typical “submit it to our wish list and we might change it in a future version” response.) I love everything about MailChimp and am anxious to switch to it from our current email marketing provider – but again this is a showstopper!
One correction to my previous reply – I said “as you imply” but in re-reading your comment, it’s more than just implying – you said explicitly “are you updating existing lists? If so, they shouldn’t require re-approval.”
Ben,
You may be interested to know that we’ve left Mailchimp and cancelled our account due to this policy. Role-based emails are a valid and actually quite effective use of email in some cases, and it’s wrong for you to disallow importing them. We’ve voted with our feet.
We have nothing against role based email addresses, except when mass importing them.
Speaking of mass imports, it’s worth nothing that MailChimp actually allows the mass import of lists in general (a major convenience), whereas other services out there will require you to re-confirm your *entire* list upon import. We think we’ve achieved a nice balance. Sorry to see you go, but hopefully you will find peace and happiness with your other email solution.
I guess it’s time to find another system that allows role-based emails. I love MailChimp but the majority of my audience are small businesses or one-man shops that like to use emails like: hello@ or info@ or billing@.
And yes, I can add them manually but at that point, I might as well send them snail mail considering how many I have to add.
Sigh. Still love you MailChimp. Just a little frustrated.
Does anyones else feel like mailchimp are COMPLETELY ignoring their customers, and disregarding the REALITY of what is happening at the base level?
This is a fact: Role based addresses, in my first hand experience of over 8 years setting up email addresses for small businesses in australia, are the Norm. Very rarely do my clients request personal names for their email addresses. I would say 95% ask specifically for “role based” addresses! This is a FACT!
Time to wake up, shrug off that terrible attitude mailchimp, and get down to making your service the best it can be, instead of frustrating, annoying and alienating your customers! The world is not black and white! Everything you guys conceive in your Tech minded brains may actually not be correct!
Hi there,
I absolutely understand the frustration of people expecting easy import functionality of newsletter-recipients with any of the blacklisted role-based e-mail user names in MailChimp. Especially in Central and Western Europe, where abuse is less of a problem and law is way looser than in the US in this regard.
Nevertheless, if you really are depending on the role-based addressees for your business, you won’t mind recording them manually or sending them a nice e-mail message (from your personal account), asking them for a non-role-based e-mail address to send the newsletter to. If they really see any advantage in receiving your newsletters or mailings, they will certainly agree to subscribe with their personal address by clicking the link taking them to the nice form you prepared for them to make this change, which will make your, their and everybody else’s life worth living by not having to deal with SPAM-issues or blacklists. This, thanks to MailChimp not changing his mind in this matter.
Thank you MailChimp, for giving me a reliable service and showing me that human beings conatantly prefer to waste time complaining than looking for solutions. I have absolutely no problem with this policy and do manually import my 1020 role-based recipients, because every single one of them means a lot to me, especially when he realises the seriousness it is treated with by me and my newsletter mailing philosophy.
Kind regards
Steve
Do you have a complete list of role addresses that get flagged? This would help us a lot.
Thanks,
k
http://blog.mailchimp.com/kb/article/what-role-addresses-does-mailchimp-specifically-block-from-bulk-importing/
I think we have 2 problems here.
One is that not only small businesses use role based email adresses for various reasons. I specifically use role based email adresses to subscribe to newsletters. I call them junk@… etc so that if I get to much spam on that address or I cannot unsubscribe from some of the newsletters I just kill the address. But I’m a tech savy paranoic nerd.
The other problem is, that basically you are not trusting our existing lists. This makes it hard to swith to your service. I’m using mailchimp for new websites and new Newsletter lists, and I love it, but for established lists this role based fiasko is no good.
And btw. how does omnivoure know that the role based email adresses are mass imported and not “organically/manually” entered?
“Role based” addresses not allowed? I guess I need to go elsewhere.
My mailing list is comprised of only e-commerce merchants. I make sure they are e-commerce merchants by REQUIRING them to use an address in their business domain. That results in a lot of ‘role based’ addresses. If Mail Chimp thinks I’m going to manually enter almost 300 addresses, they’re sadly mistaken.
There goes my business
We wanted to migrate our current customers to MC – 2000 entries in list, 500 of them role based. Checked the list, our most important use these role based stuff – so bye bye MailChimp. Now I have to deal with the ugly phplist stuff.
This policy may be needed/work in USA.
It is a deal breaker almost anyway else in the world.
In New Zealand almost 30% of business email addresses use so called ‘role’ addresses. sales@ , info@ , inquiry@
It has Nothing to do with ‘spam’.
I understand your position, & it’s good you managed to drop the ‘Is Spam’ stats. It just doesn’t relate to non-USA reality. And is therefore a deal breaker.
We use spam Filters.
I certainly think that it is incorrect to reject role emails. Although true often they are not specific to a person, as a company we do sometimes subscribe to lists which we want all people within a role to have access too.
It would have been really handy if you could provide a list of all the role based emails you reject.
This is the link that shows all the role based emails mailchimp blocks.
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/what-role-addresses-does-mailchimp-specifically-block-from-bulk-importing/
Norman,
FYI this is NOT a comprehensive list. We had role-based emails rejected that were not on this list. It appears that when you submit an import list, Mailchimp analyzes the incoming emails, and if it sees a bunch of values on the left side of the @, it assumes those must be role-based and it rejects them. I don’t know if that’s what it’s doing but it seems it must, since we had emails rejected that were role-based but not on the “official” list.
That is plain stupid if that is the case. how am i supposed to enforce the criteria on my forms during sign up if i dont know the role based emails they reject.
Funny thing is I have posted comments on this and used a role based email address to notify me of replies and that worked!
If you’re using our signup forms, and people are opting in on their own free will, you have no problem.
It’s when you do mass imports that we prohibit role addresses.
Not everyone who has members who agree to receive communications have them sign up through your email forms. Think a bit bigger picture, we have our own signups T&Cs and processes in place – we’re not just blogs!
We left mailchip because of this too. Silly, silly policy.
It’s of course up to you guys to run your company the way you want but honestly, I cannot see you surviving long in the marketplace with this policy. The fact is, your closest competitors do NOT require us to re-confirm addresses after an import, and they certainly don’t prevent us from importing some of our most important addresses. In fact, ive never heard of anyone else having this policy.
Best of luck.
We too work in the hospitality industry and I estimate as many as 50% of our contacts rely on ‘role addresses’.
Moments ago, I was in the process of moving from Constant Contact to MailChimp. After importing 5 of my lists, I spotted the role address error.
A very silly policy, this, and, reading this comment thread, clearly not popular.
Mailchimp, this is a baffling shortcoming of what is a technically superior system to CC. I’m so disappointed. As a result, I have no option but to abandon my move to MailChimp.
What a shame.
The company I work for has customers in the retail sector, most of who sign up for accounts using role based emails (info@mycompany.com). We need to import their data from Chargify to Mailchimp to send them regular updates.
I understand that I can manually add the rejected addresses, which is fine. The difficulty is when I need to reimport changes to those customers from chargify before a mailout (ie; to update their status to ‘cancelled’ and not accidentally send to them). Any role based emails I added manually will be rejected on the next import (even if they are already on the system) so I cannot even update them. This is somewhat frustrating, and leading me to consider a different system.
:(
Did you find any alternative to MC?
This is really annoying. For example we work with bed and breakfast owners. Their email addresses are always role based eg enquiries@bedandbreakfastname.com.
Now I have to manually upload 150 email addresses. Your email software should make things easier not harder. It’s quicker to send my members an email using the old fashioned bcc than use your system! Going to have to look at other systems now as these are weekly updates and our members grow each week. Sigh.
The manual import is one-time only.
> The manual import is one-time only
Yes, but then if the customers change, you have to manually edit them, you cannot ‘autoupdate’ their details from a CSV, even if you have manually put them on the system. Their emails just get rejected, again.
I can handle a little manual input, if the system would then allow me to auto update them in future. But the way it currently works is a problem.
Too much for a 4500 email role-based addresses that represent 35% of my mailing list.
Incredibly frustrating. Over 40% of our opt-in subscribers are using a role based email address and I’m pretty certain that they are ‘real’ people. Time to leave all the banana messages behind and look elsewhere.