How Mailchimp Prevents and Handles Abuse

Mailchimp has millions of users all over the world, so we’re bound to get abuse complaints every now and again. That said, we take abuse very seriously and make every effort to prevent it.

In this article, you’ll learn the steps we take to prevent abuse in Mailchimp, and how we handle abuse when it happens.

Report abuse

If you need to report abuse of our system, head over to our Abuse Desk. We take all reports of abuse seriously, and will investigate thoroughly.

How we prevent abuse

We have a number of systems and policies in place intended to keep abuse to an absolute minimum.

• Automated Abuse Prevention
  Our automated abuse-prevention system monitors content created in Mailchimp and tracks email performance to detect problematic activity.
• Human Reviewers
  We use human review to supplement our automated abuse prevention. This gives our approach an effective combination of quality and efficiency.
• Terms of Use
  We require all our users to agree to our Terms of Use when they create their account, and again when they import new contacts.
• Compliance with Laws
  We take extensive measures to help our users comply with laws that may apply to their business. For example, all our emails automatically include an unsubscribe link and we’re developing new tools to help with the GDPR.
• Best Practices
  We make an effort to educate Mailchimp users on industry best practices through our guides and tutorials and application messaging.

We realize no policy can completely prevent abuse, but we maintain these lines of defense in order to minimize the potential for abuse of our system.

How we handle abuse

When issues do arise, we take swift and appropriate action to address them. Here a few ways we surface and respond to issues quickly.

• All emails created in Mailchimp are assigned a campaign ID so we can track content and investigate abuse.
• When we receive an abuse complaint, we investigate immediately. If the email or user account looks suspicious in any way, we’ll suspend the account during the investigation.
• We’re registered with major ISPs and we work with our integration partners, like Facebook and Google, to receive reports and alerts when they’ve detected abuse by our users.
• We closely monitor accounts with a combination of automated and human review processes. If anything indicates there’s an issue, we assess the severity of the issue and take appropriate action.

Please know that as Mailchimp grows, we’ll continue to be vigilant about identifying and addressing abuse across all our marketing channels.