Hi Suresh > There seems to be a miscommunication - I personally have seen > Mailchimp / Mandrill suspend a large number of spamming customers.
Yes, the Mailchimp Customer I remember most, because one of my personal email addresses were targeted, was suspended, but probably re-subscribed under a slightly different name later, or managed to talk the Mailchimp support to unblock him and kept going for about half a year or more, before Mailchimp managed to get rid of him. I have seen similar cases on many occasions. But what disturbed me most here, is the lack of legal cooperation from mailchimp. It was obvious, that the sender was located in either Switzerland or italy. The spamvertized website was in perfect German, with prices in Swiss Francs, advertising products from Italy. Recipients were probably only email addresses under the .ch tld. It was obvious the spamer was trying to avoid disclosing any kind of way to identify who he is. His web hoster (in Italy) claimed he could not tell us his identity, because the emails were not sent via him and thus it could not be proved, that this was not a joe-job targeting his customer and that I should address mailchimp from where the emails were being sent. So it would, under swiss law and probably most other countries in europe, have been the duty of Mailchimp, to disclose his identity. Mailchimp refused with reference to US law. And yes, the case was forwarded to the legal department of Mailchimp. Would the abuse desk have respected the legal request and identified the customer towards the recipient providing proof that he did in fact receive the emails? As operator of a Blacklist, we have the request from the users to list the IP Adresses and Domains of Mailchimp, because of such incidents. But there are also the occasional legitimate emails sent via Mailchimp we would not like to block. So my hope would be that if Mailchimp whould make little changes in their anti-spam policy like: * Requesting a proof that the recipients have opted-in to receive advertisement emails instead of stating 'opt-out' is good enough. (no, buying addresses from eBay with label 'guaranteed opt-in' is not good enough if there is no verifiable proof of how they got opted in) * Requesting their customers to provide a full legal address in their emails. * If a customer fails to provide legal contact information or obviously tries to obfuscate his identity, that his contact details would be disclosed by Mailchimp to any recipient providing proof of receicing one of his emails via mailchimp and requiring to contact the sender to get a proof of opt-in or previous business relation as intended by the anti-spam laws of many countries in Europe. This are just three small changes to the policy that would not affect legitimate customers of mailchimp, but who would make it harder for spamers to abuse mailchimp and especially who would make it possible to identify them and prosecute them according to the anti-spam laws in the country they are operating. Kind regards -Benoît Panizzon- -- I m p r o W a r e A G - Leiter Commerce Kunden ______________________________________________________ Zurlindenstrasse 29 Tel +41 61 826 93 00 CH-4133 Pratteln Fax +41 61 826 93 01 Schweiz Web http://www.imp.ch ______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
