MailChimp Labs

What It Does:

Project Omnivore is a massively scalable abuse prediction system designed to help our abuse desk protect the deliverability and reputation of MailChimp.

Background Info:

We used an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then a giant Hadoop Map/Reduce program running on a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers for 20 days to compare 61 trillion email data points. The result? We can predict the future of your email campaign.

What It Does:

Enter some words or phrases that you're considering for your subject lines, and MailChimp will tell you if they'll perform well, and even offer some alternative ideas. It's been described as "like Google's Keyword Tool, but for email marketing."

Background Info:

We used our in-house nVidia Tesla supercomputer, plus Amazon EC2, to analyze all email campaigns ever sent from our system to determine how certain words (among other things) affect campaign performance. The actual purpose and findings of that project are classified, but the subject line suggester is a very nifty by-product that we turned into a free add-on for all MailChimp users.

What It Does:

Analytics360 brings Google Analytics and MailChimp directly into your WordPress dashboard so you can visualize trends, see how blog posts and email campaigns affect traffic, chart your list growth and more.

What It Does:

Upload a photo and let Pictaculous analyze it and suggest a color palette. You can also snap a picture with your iPhone, email it to colors@mailchimp.com and your color palette will be sent to you!

What It Does:

Got a bunch of RSS feeds that you want to mash together? Paste them into Chimp Feedr and we'll create an aggregated feed that mixes them all together!

Background Info:

Chimp Feedr is the perfect compliment to MailChimp's RSS to email campaign feature, which makes it easy to automatically send out campaigns to your list when you blog.

What It Does:

Ever have to email or share a really, really long URL? It's a pain in the neck, and pretty ugly. EepURL transforms long, ugly URLs into short, easily shared URLs with monkey flair. It's particularly handy because it allows for easy posting to email and Twitter.

Background Info:

We developed a tool that allows MailChimp customers to post their email campaign archive links to Twitter, Facebook, and other social sharing sites (See: MailChimp Integration With Twitter). While working on that tool, we developed a URL shortener, and decided---heck, let's make it available to the public.

What It Does:

Makes it easy to create Google Visualization charts from your database using PHP.

Background Info:

MC_Google_Visualization provides simple support for integrating Google Visualization charts and graphs with your own internal database. It includes a complete parser for the Google Visualization Query Language, giving you the same ease of pivoting and formatting data from your database as is currently possible with Google Spreadsheets.

What It Does:

Whenever you send HTML email campaigns, you should create a plain-text version of your campaign, and send both as a multipart-alternative formatted file. When people can't (or won't) view your HTML email, the plain-text version of your message will appear instead. Or, if they're checking email on a mobile device, they'll often see the plain-text version. Actually making the plain-text version of your email is a COMPLETE P.I.T.A. So we made it automatic.

Background Info:

We really, really, really didn't want to write a bunch of scripts that simply yanked out HTML code to try to build a sloppy plain-text message. So we used the old-school, plain-text-only Lynx browser as our engine. Remember Lynx? What's cool about it is Lynx will actually generate plain-text versions of your HTML tables.

What It Does:

In order to make your HTML emails render properly in all the different email readers out there (especially webmail clients like Gmail and Hotmail), you've got to make sure any CSS in your code is inlined (linked or embedded CSS breaks in many email readers). This tool will automatically take any embedded CSS that you paste in, and convert it into inline CSS for your HTML email.

Background Info:

This is a core piece of our template building engine in MailChimp. It's actually a tiny piece of a very sophisticated system that dynamically generates our template designer interface (like the "choose background color" and "choose font" pulldown menus), using the CSS code for each template. We took the CSS-inliner piece out, and made it a standalone tool.

What It Does:

Show MailChimp your company's website, and he'll analyze your code to find your logo, your brand's color scheme, and fonts. Then, he'll use that information to design an HTML email template for you. Don't like it? Just keep hitting the "remix" button for infinitely many different color combinations. He'll even scan your website for content, and stick that in as placeholder text.

Background Info:

We have over 40,000 users, and about one dozen employees. We're scalable, and we want to keep it that way. So instead of hiring hundreds and hundreds of designers to help customers upload logo files and tweak a few bg-colors, we built this. Key components of this experiment have already trickled down into the MailChimp application. Note that MailChimp's effectiveness depends on your code. If your website uses extremely complicated code, MailChimp no likey.

What It Does:

You program stuff in LOLCode, then this thing translates it to PHP and runs it.

Background Info:

LOLcats is a complete waste of time of a website, and we love it. The site's users have developed their own whacked out language and vocabulary and someone (who apparently smoked some bad crack) turned it into a programming language. We just thought it would be funny to make the MailChimp API work with LOLcode, so we did this.