It's been ages since our last System Alert message. Since then, we experienced tremendous growth in our customer base, so for a lot of you, this will be your first time hearing from us (hi there). As a reminder, System Alerts are "important messages we send to all registered MailChimp users concerning your account." We try to keep these few and far between. Promise.
On to business...
1. Our terms of use have been modified.
This won't matter to most of you. But our lawyer requires us to send an email whenever we update our terms of use. The majority of the changes involve dealing with people who "game the system." For example, our Omnivore program, declassified a few months ago, will automatically shut down abusers to protect the deliverability of our system. In some cases, they're good users who mean no harm, but who've made simple list etiquette mistakes. Our abuse team can help "rehabilitate" most of those people. But on rare occasions, it's a truly nasty user who specifically intended to abuse MailChimp. After getting their accounts shut down, some of them actually have the nerve to demand a refund. Sigh. So the terms have been modified to not only be very specific about the fact that we won't give refunds to abusers that we shut down, but that we also have the right to charge extra penalties if we catch them abusing the system. There were other changes we made, but you can get them in full detail by visiting our Terms of Use page.
2. Our privacy policy has been updated too.
First and foremost, we haven't changed the fact that we never rent, sell, or give away your list to anybody. That would be evil. Instead, we're trying to reduce evil (the email kind), but we really want to make that more transparent.
First, some background information.
Our user base grew more than 350% in 2009 over 2008, and 35% in QTR1 of 2010 alone. And we're currently delivering, on average, more than 20M messages a day.
 Delivery volume graph pulled from this MailChimp blog post
The growth is nice and all, but what concerns us is that it's impossible to employ enough humans to monitor that kind of volume for abuse. So an always-on, 24/7 abuse algorithm like Omnivore is critical to scaling our operation (and protecting the email ecosystem). We're mainly changing our privacy policy because Omnivore is growing and getting smarter, and now has the ability to sync up with services that provide anti-spam and anti-abuse solutions. We want to make it clear that we sometimes work with those services to protect MailChimp's deliverability. Also, we're making it transparent that, in conjunction with Omnivore, we still use humans who do occasionally review your content from time to time. Our use of the Social Graph Finally, just about everybody understands that social media is becoming crucial to providing "real time" customer support these days. We're not just talking about having a twitter and facebook page. These days, it's turning into the preferred medium for customers to talk to us. It helps us communicate faster and learn more about our customers (now if they could just give us more than 140 characters). Companies are increasingly using social media tools (like Tweetdeck, Cotweet, and Radian6 for example) to monitor what their customers think and say about their brand, and to research their customers. MailChimp may be launching similar tools soon (more on that later) to help our customers (you) learn more about their ( your) customers. For example, if we see a tweet where someone is complaining about MailChimp, we want to help them. Fast. So it would be nice to be able to correlate a user's twitter handle to their MailChimp account, analyze the problem, and get back to them with a solution. We've updated our privacy policy to tell you that we use social media, social networks, and the social graph (always responsibly) to learn more about you ( not your list, and not your customers). Other Changes
I’ve addressed what I consider to be the most important changes to our privacy policy. There are other changes. If you have any questions, your first step should be to read the new revision. If you have concerns or questions about the changes, contact me at privacy@mailchimp.com Thanks for your time. Regards, Ben Chestnut Co-founder, CEO P.S. We'll be launching a major MailChimp upgrade (v5.2) later this month. Please keep an eye out for announcements on the blog, twitter, and in the app. In case you missed the last upgrade news, check out MailChimp v5, and then the enhancements to groups management we launched in v5.1
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