MailChimp has been around since 2001. With millions of users sending campaigns to hundreds of millions of recipients, we’re bound to get abuse reports every now and then. We take abuse reports seriously, and we go to great lengths to prevent abuse within our system.

How MailChimp prevents and combats abuse

1. We have a team of human reviewers, who approve new MailChimp accounts and detect abuse within our system. Our staff uses a variety of criteria to evaluate accounts, ranging from the obvious WHOIS and IP information, to some not–so–obvious behavioral patterns.
2. We require all users to agree to our Terms of Use before they can set up a MailChimp account, and again before they can import any existing customer lists into their accounts.
3. Omnivore, our powerful abuse–detection technology, keeps our system clean by predicting bad behavior in campaigns before they even get out the door.
4. We offer customizable signup forms for customers who are starting from scratch with MailChimp and don't have a list of customers to import. These signup forms only use the double opt–in method, which keeps prank signups out and stores opt–in proof for every subscriber (like IP Address and date/time stamps).
5. Customers are required to submit their physical mailing address and a permission reminder (”you are receiving this email because you signed up at...”) for every list they set up in MailChimp. We insert that information into every campaign.
6. We automatically insert a one–click unsubscribe link in every campaign sent from our system.
7. All lists managed in MailChimp are automatically cleaned of soft bounces (on the fifth campaign attempt), and hard/undeliverable bounces are cleaned instantly.

How we educate customers

1. We keep our users updated with the latest email-marketing best practices, tips, etiquette, and do’s and don’ts via our MailChimp Blog and customer newsletters.
2. We offer our handy guides to help users learn their way around MailChimp and email marketing in general.
3. Throughout MailChimp’s user interface (when sending campaigns, setting up lists, and designing templates), we provide customers with links and background information to help them understand email etiquette and spam laws.

How we deal with issues

1. We embed every email campaign sent from our servers with a Campaign ID, so recipients can easily report abuse to MailChimp. When we receive complaints through our abuse form, we investigate immediately. If the campaign or user account appears suspicious in any way, we’ll suspend the account during the investigation.
2. We’re registered with major ISPs and anti-spam authorities to receive automated feedback loop alerts when any of our users’ recipients report abuse. When we’re able to parse those alerts, we remove the recipient from the user’s list. If the reports exceed a certain threshold, we send a warning to the user. If the warnings exceed a reasonable threshold, we suspend the user’s account and investigate. Most ESPs and ISPs say a reasonable threshold for abuse complaints is 0.1 percent (one out of a thousand people reported your campaign as junk). Because of the sheer volume of emails sent from our IPs, and because most of our IPs are shared across multiple users, our threshold is stricter than that.