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Comment by slau | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: it's my tweet that is linked in this story, and I submitted it. There's no news story as far as I know. Better links are appreciated.

Mandrill stopped delivering email at 04:51 UTC on the 4th of February. Nobody knows whether the received emails are lost, what the cause is, how soon any change will occur. It took Mandrill over 9 hours to acknowledge the issue.

They are posting the same message over and over, and have now been silent for over 9 hours.

Mandrill also recently got rid of their status page. A few months ago, their API has started returning nginx errors, and their status page looked like a Christmas tree; every reload would indicate different green/orange statuses. The certificate their MX servers uses is invalid (wrong domain), which prevents email delivery from compliant Danish email servers.

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We're currently using Mandrill to send outbound emails, although we've had issues with some API calls, all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered.

Certain things like viewing email content look broken on certain emails which doesn't hurt the business, yet...

It's true though that this service is nearing death as hasn't had an update to any of its features since it merge with Mailchimp.

Looking to change service providers soon, as soon as we figure out how to render emails to html before sending. Mandrill has a `render` endpoint which makes this easy. None of the others have this yet.

Yes, outbound has been solid for us, too. The issue is inbound. We literally have hundreds if not thousands of customer support agents unable to work because of this.

I've had lots of issues with outbound. Bulk sends failing completely. Individual seems to work but is very slow.

Not that it's a great alternative, but SendGrid uses Handlebars templates so it's pretty easy to render it yourself using any Handlebars library. You could probably quite easily write an AWS Lambda or similar that fetches a template using their API, populates it with data you post and returns the HTML.

The weirdest UX problem I've found with Mandrill is that you can't use the browser "CTRL-F" to search an email template unless the text is _currently_ visible. Not sure how they manged to mess up the search functionality for a text box that is intended to have massive amounts of text in it. It makes it harder to do a minor spot edit of a template than it should be. Things begin to make sense now...

I believe this is a performance optimization to limit what's actually in the DOM for large documents. The code editor is fairly common and is also used by Google Tag Manager, but it annoys the heck out of me too.

A few years ago when Mandrill dramatically increased prices there was a big exodus of HN users. I solicited pricing and transition info from a number of different providers and summarized it here[0].

[0] http://gabe.durazo.us/tech/hacker-news-mandrill-followup/

Take a look at MJML.

Already using MJML to design email templates and wrapping <mj-raw> tags around Mailchimp conditional tags like IF:SOMETHING .. |END:IF|. I guess it's time to render the html emails ourselves, merge with params and then use whatever other third party transactional email service.

Can't recommend Foundation for Emails highly enough for rendering html. I found it super easy to use (Moustache templates) and very flexible for managing multiple versions (translations) of a newsletter.

The assignment I had was to write, coordinate translations, produce and send a quarterly newsletter with anywhere between 20 and 35 translations per issue + optional separate content to be included on a country-to-country basis. Production time from drafted newsletter to final send was about 2 weeks.

The Foundation tool felt to me a little like jekyll for email. I had a a lot of fun with it.

https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/docs/

Disclaimer: I have no connection to Foundation. Just a delighted user.

> Mandrill has a `render` endpoint which makes this easy. None of the others have this yet.

Klaviyo provides similar functionality: https://www.klaviyo.com/docs/api/email-templates

Disclaimer: I work at Klaviyo.

> all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered.

You can't trust their interface during these outages, we have been there before, even though their Outbound page says "Delivered" it isn't unless there are SMTP events attached, if it looks like this, your email is queued, not sent: https://cdn.servnice.com/screenie/c1Og3TcrkLFV9Hg.jpg

We’ve been using https://MJML.io and Handlebars and owning the rendering on our end. It’s been a breeze.

> Mandrill has a `render` endpoint which makes this easy. None of the others have this yet.

Campaign Monitor have the ability to take an API call and render into HTML using templates, this might do what you want: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/transactional-email...

(I'm unaffiliated with CM, just a customer)

Sounds pretty rubbish for you and their other customers :(

I'm afraid I don't have any answer for you, but I'm guessing quite a few people will be moving to sendgrid[1] - I'm not sure how I'd be able to trust a supplier after this lack of response to an outage.

[1] - https://sendgrid.com/use-cases/transactional-email/

We're actually moving to SES as we speak, and the move should be done in a few hours. It's something we had planned, but it just sucks that this is how a paid service gets terminated.

Recently moved our company from Mandrill to SendGrid - mainly because we were having deliverability issues with Mandrill.

We're definitely a lot happier from that perspective (and obviously given this issue I'm glad we moved), and overall it's really good. A couple of things to be aware of:

- Unlike Mandrill you can't send with a test API key and then view the emails. We end up sending real emails to a test inbox, which has some pros and cons - but cons include it costing email sends, and Gmail being awkward and silently de-duping sometimes.

- You also can't view sent email content, at all (beyond the subject). Mandrill you can, Sendgrid don't seem to save it.

- Mandrill/others probably has the same issue, but SendGrid without your own IP sends emails to new recipients extremely slowly. And they lock your whole account while they're doing it, password resets won't send to existing recipients and nor will test emails to your test inbox.

- You also only get 3 days of email send history, you can pay for up to 30 I think. I'm not sure what the rule was with Mandrill but they seemed to keep a lot more available, though their search would time out most of the time so I'm not sure how much was really there and accessible.

Mandrill is 30 days of send history with 90 days of stats.

So it’s dead, then? At least those are not the signs of a healthy operation that just made a rectifiable mistake. Combined with the length of downtime, sounds really bad...

> which prevents email delivery from compliant Danish email servers.

Any email server which validates that the remote host name matches the cert will be be very sad. Doesn't matter if it's compliant (to what btw?), in practice email server owners are sloppy.

The Danish authorities have apparently mandated TLS 1.2 when sending certain mails, due to their interpretation of GDPR. I don't have the details though.

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