Mailchimp and the dating industry. No emails for dating sites?

Mailchimp is a really popular and powerfull mailing list service provider....what is a bit weird however, the do not accept dating sites to send emails to their customers.

If you look at the terms & conditions you find the following:

Some industries have higher-than-normal abuse complaints, which can in turn jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. Nothing personal, but in order to maintain the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we can’t allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:

• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Work from home, make money on online, and lead generation opportunities
• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market-related content
• Gambling services or products
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities
• Mortgages and loans
• Nutritional, herbal, and vitamin supplements
• Adult novelty items or references
• List brokers or list rental services

Extremely astonishing: Escort and dating services are mentioned within the same line

Also it is really amazaing that they mention dating services in the same list as Gambling and Pharmaceutical produtcs.

So if you run a dating website - don't use Mailchimp - especially do not make any payments to Mailchimp as your account will be disabled and the money is gone!

The brute force dating attack of a "math genius"

On Wire.com, Kevin Poulson wrote an interesting article about the Mathematician Chris McKinlay, who tried to - and finally found - a date on okcupid.

Unlike the majority of okcupid users, he wrote scripts to harvest the website with user data, then matched the user profiles with his own interests - and contacted them....

He then invited some of the women,  who wrote back, on a date....after a few unsuccessful attempts, he even met a woman he even married (probably by now).

You can read the whole story here:

http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/

 

What I was wondering?

 

Did OkCupid sue him for financial compensation? Did any of the users report him as their "private" data was illegally copied to another server / pc ? (and might still kick around on a harddisk in his flat)

Or what that a viral marketing idea from OkCupid ?

If so, the viral marketing campaign really went viral - most sites picked up on this story.