Mailchimp changes signup process

As of October 31, 2017 signup forms and popup boxes provided by Mailchimp will no longer default to a double / confirmed opt-in process.

Starting October 31, single opt-in will become the default setting for all MailChimp hosted, embedded, and pop-up signup forms.

This announcement was made earlier today in their newsletter and has been spreading like wildfire around the email community.

Of course, everyone has their opinion on why, including me. I haven’t talked to anyone over there about this, but I suspect this relates to the listbombing issue.
I expect that part of their response to subscription bombing was to look at their subscription forms and harden them against abuse. But, as they were looking at it, they also started thinking about the COI process and how COI itself could be used as an attack vector.
The result is removing the COI component from their default forms. Customers who want or need to continue to use COI can enable that option on their setting page.
I feel like I’ve blogged a lot about COI in the past but looking through old posts I can’t actually find many posts on it. (COI: an old topic resurrected, Sledgehammer of COI). There’s a reason for that, COI is a tool and is useful in some circumstances. But it’s not THE solution to deliverability problems.
The discussions around this change have been interesting.
From my perspective, this is not a huge change. No one who used Mailchimp was forced into using COI. There were always ways to work around the default. It makes it easier for some of their customers to run single opt-in mailing lists but it’s only one ESP changing their policies.
I am in the minority thinking this isn’t a big deal. The rest of the industry is full of speculation about this change.
Some compliance and abuse people worry that Mailchimp has gone to spam side. (I doubt it.) Other people liked being able to point at Mailchimp as an example of COI being a best practice and now they can’t. (Well, yeah, time for a better narrative.)
Marketers speculated financial pressures and loss of customers drove this change. (I doubt it, it wasn’t that long t they drove customers off Mandrill.) Others are happy MC “got with the times.” (Uh, they’re actually ahead of a lot of folks in seeing patterns and innovating.)
Whatever the reason, it’s a pretty big change in policy for Mailchimp. But I don’t expect to see more spam from their networks. They’re still going to keep their customers as clean as possible.
EDIT: On Oct 30, Mailchimp announced that the default for .eu customers would continue to be double opt-in to facilitate their compliance with GDPR.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco, Gmail representatives presented a session about best practices and what they wanted to see from senders.
I came out of the session with a few takeaways.

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The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders.
The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing up for mail they want. Because MAPS is using typo domains to drive listings, they’re going to see a lot of mail from companies that are doing single opt-in. I realize that there are problems with single opt-in mail, but the problems depends on a lot of factors. Not all single opt-in lists are full of traps and spam and bad data.
In fact, one ESP has a customer with a list of more than 50 million single opt-in email addresses. This sender mails extremely heavily, and yet sees little to no blocking by public or private blocklists.
Trend/MAPS policy is singling out senders that are sending mail people signed up to receive. We know for sure that hard core spammers spend a lot of time and money to identify spamtraps. The typo traps that Trend/MAPS use are pretty easy to find and I have no doubt that the real, problematic spammers are pulling traps out of their lists. Legitimate senders, particularly the ESPs, aren’t going to do that. As one ESP rep commented on yesterday’s post:

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