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Comment by wmboy | Hacker News Reader

One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for our clients).

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That makes a lot of sense! On the backend, we've already built a way to view content samples (for compliance reasons, e.g. if something looks spammy and we need a human to confirm). It would certainly be possible to expose that functionality to users. I'll run that by the PM on the relevant team - you're not alone in wanting that feature.

I just tried SendGrid out now, unless I'm mistaken you can't even see subject line in the emails that are sent, is this correct?

You can look in the Email Activity tab to see a history of events, along with their category (you might use this for "receipt", "forgot password", etc.).

https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html

If you're doing one-to-many campaigns, we also have a marketing email product called Marketing Campaigns that offers a more detailed content history.

Definitely +1 on this. It's a great feature to see if A) emails are being sent and B) templates weren't messed up in some way.

(I have had many a batch email with "{{name}" or some other templating error, heh.)

We're working on adding that feature into Mailgun now. We store the content for compliance review and scheduled sends.

Disclosure: I lead product development @ Mailgun.

That would an amazing feature add.

I'm currently sending 150k/mo with Mailgun and log everything for 6 months. It's rarely accessed, but invaluable when it is.

For your reference: http://blog.mailgun.com/how-to-view-your-messages/

I think NOW it's the time to build that feature, ASAP. cc @etjossem

Yeah absolutely if SendGrid builds this functionality and creates a 'Welcome Mandrill customers' page, then you guys will get a whole heap of new signups right away!

Agree 100%.. this is an insane move by Mandrill and if SendGrid can at least show email subjects they will reap the benefits imo !

We're discussing what it would take to build it right now. It's absolutely one of the things people appreciated about Mandrill, and I know we want to ease the transition as much as possible.

Today, we launched a new API that allows you to access the content of messages you've sent over the last three days. We have details on our blog @ http://blog.mailgun.com/how-to-view-your-messages/

We do this (Sendwithus.com) -- not only see email with all personalization, but see it on the device a customer used (was the link really broken on an iPhone?)

CSS inlining as well - last time we looked SendGrid did not have this functionality.

There are lots of existing resources out there for automatically inlining CSS after writing your template, so we recommend you use whichever one you like best.

Zurb Foundation has one with a web interface: http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/inliner.html

I personally prefer Jon Kemp's open source inliner, which is a good choice if you want to do that step locally: https://github.com/jonkemp/inline-css

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