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Comment by adnans | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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)

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.

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