Why Your Newsletter Went Missing

By: Peter H. Lewis

Updated Feb. 16, 2011, 1:15 p.m.

News junkies, are you missing your morning Bay Citizen fix?

The daily email newsletter sent by The Bay Citizen to more than 10,000 subscribers has been blocked by the news organization’s email service, after one reader filed a spam complaint over a Valentine’s Day fundraising pitch.

Richard A. Knee, a freelance writer in San Francisco, objected to the annual email solicitation sent to “our biggest news lovers” offering a Valentine’s Day discount of 30 percent on an annual membership. The offer was sent by Rose Roll, The Bay Citizen’s vice president of membership, to people who had opted to receive the daily Morning Briefing newsletter, which summarizes the top stories on baycitizen.org.

“I find the Bay Citizen's daily news updates useful but not so with fund requests or ad/promo messages,” Knee said Wednesday. “I believe I relayed these sentiments to The Bay Citizen several weeks ago.”

So when Knee received the annual “love letter” on Valentine’s Day, offering a Bay Citizen annual membership for $35 instead of the usual $50, he filed complaints to The Bay Citizen’s email provider, Atlanta-based MailChimp, and to the Federal Trade Commission’s anti-spam database, spam@uce.gov. The FTC’s spam database was created to allow people to report “false or misleading” emails “involving pyramid schemes, money-making chain letters, credit card scams, credit repair scams, bogus weight-loss plans, fraudulent business opportunities, and other scams that were promoted via email.”

Roll said she awoke at 6 a.m. Wednesday to discover that MailChimp had shut down the daily newsletter service because of Knee’s complaints.

“When we receive complaints through our abuse form, we investigate immediately,” a MailChimp auto-response system wrote to Roll. “If the campaign or user account appears suspicious in any way, we’ll suspend the account during the investigation.” The service checked the FTC database and saw that baycitizen.org had been added to the blacklist of spammers because of Knee’s complaint.

A “campaign” refers to a mailing sent to people on a mailing list. Hundreds if not thousands of nonprofits and other companies operate email campaigns through MailChimp.

According to MailChimp policies, The Bay Citizen’s daily newsletter campaign cannot be restarted until it purges its mailing list of all email addresses that have never opened a message from The Bay Citizen, even though everyone on the list signed up, or “opted in,” to receive the newsletters. Roll said approximately 5,000 of the 20,000 recipients of the newsletter and fundraising appeals fall into that category.

Knee has been a registered user of baycitizen.org since April 2011, and signed up for the newsletters in November, Bay Citizen computer records show. The records also show that he has never donated to the nonprofit.

Roll said the technical staff at The Bay Citizen began deleting the 5,000 users in order to restore the MailChimp service, but the flood of requests to the server computers that handle the mailing lists caused the system to crash. The lists must now be purged in smaller increments, and until the task is completed, MailChimp will not restore the newsletter mailings.

Knee said that while he does not appreciate being asked to pay for a membership to support the nonprofit organization, he had not intended to knock The Bay Citizen’s newsletter off the Internet.

“I expected a response, but this particular response went beyond what I had anticipated,” Knee wrote Wednesday in response to a Bay Citizen reporter’s question. “Most spam-complaint responses consist of form e-letters.”

By midday, Knee wrote to MailChimp asking it to restore The Bay Citizen’s email.

“I did not intend that the spam complaint should cripple the sender's e-mail, web and other Internet-related capabilities,” Knee wrote to MailChimp’s email police. “A simple warning would have sufficed. Perhaps I should have made this clear in my complaint message. If you are able to reinstate service to BayCitizen.org, I urge you to do so as quickly as possible.”

The service is still down, and MailChimp has not responded to email requests for an explanation.

“I am indeed surprised that one complaint can cripple an organization's e-mail,” Knee wrote in response to a reporter’s question.

Roll said email “is our best online fundraising channel.”

“It’s very successful for us, and we can’t not use it,” she said. She said she does not know when MailChimp will conclude its investigation and restore the daily newsletter mailings.

Knee wrote that he still resents fundraising solicitations from The Bay Citizen. But, he wrote, “I deeply regret any inconvenience that this episode has caused to the BayCitizen.org news team and to the readers who rely on your news product.”