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Mailchimp Makes Project Omnivore Public

Pretty impressive blog post at MailChimp today, in which they make public the details of their Project Omnivore: http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/project-omnivore-declassified.

In short:

Omnivore is a program that runs in the background and analyzes email campaign and user account data. Non-stop.

When it finds anything suspicious about a MailChimp user or his campaigns, it’ll do one of two things:

1. Send the user a warning for something that looks problematic.
2. Suspend a user’s account for something bad, send them a warning, and alert our abuse team to investigate the account.

The long version is at the link and the impressive part is how much data and prediction they are incorporating into the tool to help them avoid sending campaigns that will damage their sending reputation in the long run. It's not just about filtering the mail stream to make sure it's not going to trip filters, but watching the list management practices of their customers.

This is the kind of thing that all ESPs are going to have to start doing moving toward, using internal systems to ensure that the right message is being sent to the right people, then combined with tools like Adaptive Delivery and real-time bounce and feedback loop processing to make sure that the messages are being sent in the right way.

Some days I'd just like to see what a company like MailChimp would do with our toolset, give them a messaging server with internal scripting that can hook into their datasources and I'd wager some very cool things would come out.