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by thibaut_barrere 732 days ago
In the case of TinyLetter, this is what happened to me: I didn't receive any email notifications before the shutdown (I verified multiple times). I reached out to Mailchimp and they deleted everything (https://x.com/thibaut_barrere/status/1771931157564727468).

Am I responsible for backups ultimately? Absolutely. Will I trust Mailchimp in the future for my own projects? Not very likely.
2 comments
fshbbdssbbgdd 732 days ago
Wonder if they really don’t have any retention at all. Maybe it would magically become available if they got a letter from a lawyer.
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thibaut_barrere 732 days ago
Yes, some form of organisational soft-delete is more than likely.

> We're afraid the TinyLetter data is no longer available

could perfectly mean: the backups we keep for one year are encrypted in case of legal trouble, but we require a legal action internally before them to be worth reaching out.

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pembrook 732 days ago
It sounds like you weren’t sending very frequently, if you logged in anytime over those 5 months there was a banner letting you know it was getting shut down.

If it makes you feel better, deliverability people will tell you a list that’s been sitting with no sends for a year or more quickly becomes worthless due to list rot (abandoned emails, expired domains, job switchers, people who forgot you exist and will mark spam/unsub, etc).

When you send to an old untouched list, it can tank your domain rep in Gmail since the algo sees tons of bounces/unsubscribes/negative signals. They basically assume you’re a spammer. So it probably would have been a PITA to warm that list again anyways. It’s shitty that gmail incentivizes bulk senders to be annoying and send a lot, but it is what it is.

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