Mail Chimp TOS. Anyone able to work with it?

[George Wright]

Hi All,

PM me if you don't want to talk about this publicly.

I'd like to use Mail Chimp auto responder. The 500 free list thingy is just too good.

However, as you know a Warrior was banned because of the fact he had a "work at home" or "IM" type business and MC doesn't allow this.

IM by nature is "work at home," however, there should be a way to work with Mail Chimp without violating their TOS. I'm afraid to ask them directly because I imagine the blanket answer is "if you have to ask....."

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to break their TOS I want to work within Their TOS.

Anyway Does anyone here have a workaround for working with Mail Chimp.

What comes to my mind is building lists with subjects like, Membership Sites, Graphic offers, Advertising offers etc. Not mentioning "work at home" or "Internet Marketing."

Any Ideas. Again, pm me with info if you don't want to talk in public about this.

George Wright

[Darrel Hawes]

Don't want to hijack your thread George, because I can't speak directly to your question...

... but I did want to mention they have some absolutely killer features that would give them the nudge over Aweber for local businesses. We might be putting a few offline clients on their system.

I was just looking over their site last night and my head was spinning.

For example, you can have an autoresponder triggered by an event in time (that's different for each person), or a calendar date. An "event" might be a birthday, while a calendar date might be the beginning of a class. These are two options they specifically mention.

Anyway...

Mail Chimp has some awesome features and I'm not surprised you are looking closely at using them.

But as you suggest, their TOS might be too restrictive for the typical internet marketing model.

[ezine ads]

Originally Posted by George Wright

IM by nature is "work at home," however, there should be a way to work with Mail Chimp without violating their TOS. I'm afraid to ask them directly because I imagine the blanket answer is "if you have to ask....."

George, maybe my correspondence with them will inspire you

Me:

I publish an internet marketing ezine and I sell ad space in it. Some of my customers' ads may contain affiliate links. If I'm not misunderstading, this is against your Terms of Use.

However, if the email sent via your servers contains only a short notification like "Table of contents: ..., here is the link to the online issue" and the ezine itself (containing the affiliate link) is hosted on another server (not yours), then is this still breaking your Terms of Use?

According to your ToU, you don't accept some content because you cannot afford to risk your deliverability. If that content never passes through your email server, then I don't see any deliverability issue. Am I right?

MailChimp answer:

In this case you are just talking about placing an add in with newsletter content, you are fine in this case.

[George Wright]

Originally Posted by ezine ads

George, maybe my correspondence with them will inspire you

Ezine ads,

Yes! That is encouraging.

Thank you very much.

George Wright

[Chuck Evans]

George, while we don't sell "work at home or IM products" we DO include links for products. No issues with MailChimp and since we switched to them our readers really enjoy the html formatting! Of course they have the option of having text or html but the MAJORITY choose html...can't blame them it looks so much better then text!

chuck