It's not an assumption, it's a core of e-mail marketing business. They can't really ask for consent to receive marketing e-mails, because they can't get much consent for this. So the whole thing relies on people being tricked into giving away e-mail addresses, unknowingly consenting to e-mail marketing, being lazy to fight unsubscribing bureaucracy, etc.

I have friends in sales in other businesses to who look at their entire job as being "buy Google ads, buy Facebook ads, buy email lists". The idea such a thing might not be ethical is absolutely foreign to them.

It doesn't take tech expertise to understand this, nor an especially advanced or specialized worldview to understand that breaking things for other people might be ethically questionable.

As both a marketer and a developer, I can say that buying an email dump is NEVER something that I would do, but not its for the ethics of it (we all know marketers have no ethics). I wouldn't buy a list to spam because THAT list isn't MY list.

The hit/conversion rate on a list of random emails, or even semi-qualified emails, that you don't have a relationship with is so incredibly low, that it isn't worth it to spam their inbox, risking my reputation (opens & clicks to spam ratio).

A one percent uptick in spam reports is enough to downgrade my sending IP enough that my real customers would start missing my emails.

Real marketers aren't going to send a automated marketing email to a list of people they don't have a relationship with.

This is such a crappy practice for bootstrapping a new email marketing list, few things infuriate me as much as this. If nothing else, it instantly makes me never want to even look at your new product or service regardless of how good it might be.

I have my own domain name, so I've started using address aliases for different things. There's no way that they can get around that.

unless you use high entropy aliases, there's nothing preventing someone from filtering out all the emails with "uncommon" domains for secondary examination. at that point, you can manually ascertain whether the email address is an alias or not.

    [email protected]       probably a legit address
    [email protected]    probably an alias

That would be the easiest way to eliminate spam from MailChimp's platform. Also probably the quickest way to eliminate a vast majority of their paying customers.

I'm pretty sure these mail services already monitor unsubscribe rates and spam flags. But there will always be false positives, i. e. legitimate recipients flagging a newsletter because they no longer want to receive it, or because they forgot they agreed.

Spam recipients, on the other hand, may not report these messages often enough. Some just don't bother, others rely on their mail client or company's filters.

That could make it difficult to find a reliable cut-off separating legitimate and spam mail.

The only real solution to this would be for the mail services to handle opt-in procedures. That, however, would effectively lock you in to a single provider, because it'd be suicide to change providers and ask for confirmation from every recipient again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communi...

I found your response very lacking. Why should everyone abandon care? Obviously some speed and others don't.

I feel your pain, but it's worth noting that email, by its very design, is intended to be open to receiving unsolicited messages. So frankly, by using email at all you have actually consented to receive unwanted emails from time to time.

I think it's unreasonable to expect MailChimp to maintain a ruthless approach to prevent people from doing something that can be done with any email client, sendmail, or any number of tools that use the open protocol of email.

Things are bad enough as it is with closed and segmented communications methods on the rise. I'm pretty happy that email exists the way that it does, and MailChimp strikes me as a company that really works hard to strike a balance between the competing needs of being useful for sending mass emails while being mindful of spam.

The filters are so good, that many people find that they can't even reach people that have asked them to subscribe to their mails, because they are still filtered out as spam. Enter MailChimp, the trusted mass mailer provider that help companies bypass the spam filters by giving their mail a respectable envelope. If they allow spammers their envelope shouldn't be respected. Actually, that's clearly the theme of the OP.

And no, by using email I consented nothing. Where I live that's actually the law - I can sue whoever sends me commercial unsolicited email, unless given explicit permission (opt-in), spammer can be liable for compensation for each and every incident.

If it was open you would probably be receiving hundreds of them a minute. The filters means many don't even try, but if the required effort was zero we would be flooded with them.

The situation was so bad before the filtering products were invented that Bill Gates tried to push small fees (stamps) as a requirement for sending emails (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fee-based-e-mail-way-to-can-spa...).

I signed up there with crypterium.io@mydomain. Some time after, I start getting blockchain-related spam to that address. I wonder how that happened!

When I pointed out on their Telegram channel that one of two things had happened, a) they sold me, b) they got hacked, I was threatened with a ban. Their fans thought I was a raving lunatic.

I now have a support ticket open. Surprisingly it isn't really going anywhere.

I no longer accept email at crypterium.io@mydomain...

See https://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-ho...

that being said - MC and other reputable ESPs have for awhile been much more concerned about consent for deliverability reasons

https://www.taylorwessing.com/globaldatahub/article-obligati...

They are paid on a lead basis. Average lead price is $5-$10. I don’t know many campaigns they run at a time, but I glanced at her laptop and it looked like at least 100 active campaigns.

There is big money in this as such people will pay to get investors.

I asked about her reason for travels. She was actually going to a conference for others in her field.

I'm sorry you've had issues with them. I hope you got a bad rep and they haven't become evil. When I used to do business with them I genuinely felt they wanted to do the right thing.

The practices these people are using are scummy as fuck.

I have different rules for different addresses. Public e-mail adresses and e-mail adresses that are meant for online services. Public ones are permanent and filtered and mailchimp and similar don't get to send mail there. The other type of address is whitelisted and disposable. Everything ends in the same mailbox. Works like a charm.