I have not ranted for some time but I just heard and saw so much crap about MailChimp that I just had to open up a draft here and let some steam out. MailChimp was my choice of newsletter software years ago and it worked fine if you leave out some quirks here and there. As the usage has grown it has been brought to my attention that this software does not scale. Throughout the conversations I’ve also discovered a way how to block any account on MailChimp. So lets start.
Scaling
Throughout the years you’ve built multiple lists. Your data has grown. You have a big announce to make and you would like to send everyone a message. You make a campaign, duplicate this to the lists and hit send on all of them. You get couple of angry replies that they received multiple messages. Oh, okay, they were on multiple lists, I’m sure there is a solution for this.
The chimp says that use groups instead of lists. Have a master list with multiple groups and then you won’t have the problem of people receiving multiple emails of the campaign. Okay, lets give it a try. You create the list, you create the groups, you populate the groups. Some people are on a single group, some are on multiple groups. You send out a master campaign and you see that couple of people unsubscribed. Thats cool. Then you find out that they were unsubscribed from all the groups and unsubscription did not even let them choose a group. WTF?
You ask the chimp for help and they say that this is a feature. Choose one, a granular approach or bazooka but not both.
Blocking Any Account at MailChimp
Scenario: you are a happy chimp and sending out campaigns, everything is fun and cool until one day you are unable to log into your account. You get a message that your account has been blocked because you’re most probably a spammer. Wow, how did that happen?
You send an email to their support and find out that they found your address from stopforumspam.com and they block your account automatically. It does not matter how you ended up on that website ( in this case you have not even registered a forum account with this email address for ages ). You send them one more email and ask what provider do they recommend to use now that this bad luck hit you. They kindly reinstate your account. Weeehah!
So if you want to block somebody from MailChimp, get their email address to one of these stop spam sites. For quickest results see stopforumspam.com/add You can be sure that they can’t do anything for 48 hours.
Conclusions
Besides the two scenarios that I’ve mentioned I’ve had many more smaller issues with MailChimp. From not being able to call them, not being able to bulk delete people from large groups, not being able to remove email header images, not seeing email addresses of shared accessees etc.
The lists are dumb and cannot talk to each other without extensive scripts from infra wizards. Likewise, even if you are a dummy yourself, you cannot actually communicate with anyone at MC (they do not use telephone technology at all) except via email or Live Chat. Also, you frequently get signed out every 30 minutes whether you are in the middle of typing an email campaign or just sitting there wondering why you chose MC all those years ago…