The biggest value Mailchimp provides is deliverability. They spend a lot of time working with ISPs to maintain the reputation of their IPs to make sure their mail ends up in the inbox and not the spam box.
You can't self host that.
The mailing list features themselves aren't much different than anyone else offers.
Sure, but this doesn't actually send the emails. That's what you plug in Mandrill, SendGrid, SES, or <SMTP-provider of choice> for.
MailChimp charge crazy money for large numbers of subscribers. If your business actually makes money on direct-marketing, that's fine, but their pricing stings if you want your marketing team to manage large lists with only occasional informational emails. And since MailChimp will give you their deliverability for 25,000 emails for $20 on Mandrill, it seems like a win-win for that use-case.
I, for one, can't wait to try this out over the weekend.
Mailchimp also has pay-as-you-go pricing where you pay per email for lists where you only email subscribers occasionally. I think its around 2c per email (depends on how much credit you purchase at once)
I would argue that they absolutely fail in that regard. The default behavior from the service seems to be "impersonate" the user - any corporation that runs an SPF has to choose to either allow (tolerate) or deny it.
Well yes that's how SPF was designed. Of course if you have an SPF record they will fail (and so will anyone else) if you don't allow them. That's kind of the point of SPF -- to prove to everyone else who you trust to deliver mail for you.
It's probably fair to say most customers want a white label solution so that's a completely reasonable default. If you're sending out emails from mailchimp on behalf of your company why wouldn't you want them to be from your company?
> hey spend a lot of time working with ISPs to maintain the reputation of their IPs to make sure their mail ends up in the inbox and not the spam box.
This is the first time I hear Mailchimp (or any other company) has some special deal or treatment from ISPs in regarding to their sending emails reputation.
This is like saying lawyers of company X spends lot of time working with judges to make sure they are winning their cases. OR like suggesting to host your website with GoDaddy because they spend lot of time working with Google so that your keywords will show up on their first SERP.
Nobody is in position to just convince ISPs to deliver your mail better than any other competitor, because that would be a special treatment that would cry for gov oversight, investigation and/or prosecution. And besides, it would be totally worthless in terms of oversight. So let's say you do have special privilege -- then some Mailchimp client gets hacked and their account used to spew spam and before its shut down there are millions of malware installed. What would Yahoo say to their customers?? Simply put, no ISP would want to waste their time giving anyone special treatment when it comes to delivery...
The truth is if you are properly configured with all belts and whistles and are using feedback loops and your IP does not have dark history, then eventually building up your reputation (continuing to send emails that are most likely not spam) you will end up at the same delivery levels as Mailchimp & co. Again, because noone at Yahoo sits down by a monitor and browse billion messages a day and decide which one came from Mailchimp (good) which one didnt (bad). But I don't blame Mailchimp that they don't want you to know about it...
One of my colleagues is currently running $25 DigitalOcean machine with Postfix and sends opted-in ~5MM messages per day with stable ~85% delivery rate. Custom scripts and no Mailchimp required.
> This is the first time I hear Mailchimp (or any other company) has some special deal or treatment from ISPs in regarding to their sending emails reputation.
If you use Gmail and PayPal you can see this in action. There will be a little key there. You have to be an approved sender to get the key. The key, besides being a visual indicator, guarantees delivery in the inbox.
Most people who admin big mail sites know each other. When their mail is bouncing, they call each other and ask for help. When they see their friend's big site getting a lot of spam warnings, they call their friend and say "hey this word in your email is triggering our spam filter, you should change it".
I don't use Gmail at all and have only used PayPal perhaps twice in the last three years so I can't be certain but you're not referring to their visual indicators for encrypted e-mail [0], right? You're talking about something different?
That's probably fine for doing your own thing but if you let your users generate email or you screw up and send something that's flagged to hell the established relationships you don't have with the companies that provide spam filtering and/or email is going to hurt. If you're just sending out occasional newsletters or whatever the time to resolve that probably wouldn't hurt but if you're sending critical email on a frequent basis (like password resets) any delay could have a big impact.
You can't self host that.
The mailing list features themselves aren't much different than anyone else offers.