MailChimp and other newsletter services

[Jemski]

I've been looking into hosted newsletter services. Quite a few people identifying MailChimp as a good choice. I was going to sign up but their site doesn't seem to have been working for 2 days which has now really put me off them.

Is anybody else having trouble using their site? Or does anyone have any info on what is wrong? Otherwise can anyone recommend any other good hosted newsletter services?

[Mike Hughes]

Their site looks OK to me? There's one other person on their forum having problems and they suggest it might be ISP/Location specific.

Mike

[Sean Williams]

Works fine for me

[Jemski]

Thanks. The reviews of MailChimp have seemed good so I was hoping it wouldn't be a problem with them.

For anyone having a similar problem, I have been able to connect using a proxy server. Not ideal but it is a workaround for now.

NOTE: for anyone unfamiliar, if you do use a proxy only use it for generic surfing - don't supply any personal information through a proxy i.e. don't log into or create any accounts, don't check webmail etc. Remember that anything you do through a proxy server can potentially be seen by someone else

Does anyone know if this connection problem is likely to be temporary or permanent problem and if there is any way to resolve it? Weird thing is I tried PING and TRACERT and both work albeit a little slow.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Working OK for me. Have you tried it in several different browsers?

[Mike Hughes]

Working via a proxy is odd as this kind of implies that something is blocking your IP address.

Quite why this would happen is a mystery but I would think about doing a serious malware check just in case something has been spamming from your PC.

Mike

[Jemski]

Thanks Mike. I understand your suggestion but for various reasons I don't think this is a malware issue.

I vaguely remember having a similar problem connecting to a different server some time back. As with this issue most people weren't having a problem just a few. As I recall the best we could narrow it down to was something to do with us having BT as an ISP.

Also, I think the problem is something is being blocked - the HTML seems to be working and any HTML links work (e.g. the links to the tour video, Mozilla, Twitter etc.) but nothing else works. So I can see all the HTML text on mailchimp.com but I can't see any images and none of the links that seemingly rely on server side scripts work. And since that is just about every link on the site that renders the entire site unusable.

Looks like the company newsletter is another job I'll be taking home

[Mike Hughes]

I was wondering if it might be a problem with security software so was looking again and saw this post from someone who appears to be mailchimp support. This was posted in response to someone having a similar problem to you.

I know it is counter-intuitive, but if you have any MailChimp addresses listed in "Internet Options->Security->Trusted Sites" then IE will not work properly with MailChimp. Our recommendation is to remove the MailChimp addresses from the Trusted sites and use the default IE security settings. (Clear cache and restart IE after changing the settings.)

Mike