About MailChimp & Their Needs
Preventing spam through web-scale email collection
MailChimp is a leading provider in email delivery, helping thousands of businesses conduct email campaigns. To ensure high-quality campaigns and prevent abuse of their product, MailChimp seeks to stop campaigns that email people without their consent.
The Challenge
Separating valid, opt-in emails from invalid emails is hard
One way to stop email campaigns from being sent to the wrong people is to check the emails being targeted by each campaign. If the email list contains a lot of emails that haven’t opted into the campaign, then it’s highly likely it’s a spam campaign. Unfortunately, without any context for these emails, it’s hard to separate what’s considered a good email versus a bad email. How do you know which emails have given permission to the campaign and which ones haven’t?
How it Worked
MailChimp uses the Giant Web Crawl to add context to emails
MailChimp pulls email addresses from the Giant Web Crawl on a daily basis. They know that all of the emails found by the Giant Web Crawl are publicly accessible on the web, visible for all to see. If an email list in MailChimp contains several of these emails, then they can flag the list as a potential spam list. It’s not a “for-sure” indicator, but it’s a very strong one. By combining this information with other signals, MailChimp can more effectively combat spam.