Mailchimp free account disabled and reinstated

Hi all, do you use an autoresponder for your email campaigns? Have you ever tried Mailchimp?

I signed up a free account with Mailchimp back in March and started playing with it. I created sign up forms in Mailchimp and placed them into my sub domains to test them out. At the beginning of April I received an email from Mailchimp, notifying me on my account being disabled.

That was an unpleasant supprise. Hey, I haven't really started doing anything yet, and I'm the law abiding citizen. :) How come my account got disabled??!! Anyway, I looked into the links in the Mailchimp notification, and digged into the prohibited content as well as some best practices recommended by Mailchimp. I remember entering information about my purchased domain name when I set up may account, but I was using a sub domain (siterubix domain) to play around. And I guess this triggered the automated abuse prevention system "Omnivore" on disabling my account.

BTW, I noticed content about affiliate marketing is one of the prohibited types, according to this page in Mailchimp site: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/ I'm not sure if this will affect some folks or not, but I just want to bring this up and let people be aware of it.

Being a little upset about Mailchimp, I went back and looked into some other autoresponders again. Most of the autoresponders offer free trail, but I don't want to go that far yet as I'm still bootstrapping my site. Mad Mimi seems to offer a free account, but they are pretty vague on their site about the free account, and I think the maximum emails allowed are a couple hundreds. That's not a good offer, compared to the more generous Mailchimp's 2,000 cap. Since I've spend some time learning Mailchimp, and I'm building my site for the local SEO niche, so I decided to contact Mailchimp and get a resolution.

Wait, Mailchimp don't have an 800 number? I searched on Google and could not find any. OK, I'll just do the email communication. What a bumper! What if I have something urgen!

After sending in my request in the contact form, Mailchimp got back to me about 1 day later, and they pretty much gave me the same info in the notification email without further explaining, but they included a few specific questions in the email - what was my intention of using their service? How did I collect emails for my list? Did I buy any email list?...

I did my best answering those questions. And they got back to me again, asking me for an example of my campaign. I have no live campaign yet, so I just gave them an outline of a campaign that I'll be running when my site is up and running. Finally they reviewed my answers and reinstated my account.

Well, I think this is just one of the many, many challenges in my entrepreneurial adventure. I'm glad that I can find lots of encouragements here in WA community. And I'm really appreciated for the inspirations, encouragements, and much much more from all the great members.

Thank you for reading this post.

Hugh