Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately this is standard MailChimp way of doing things ever since they screwed over paying customers and merged with Mandrill [1].

They are the opposite of a transparent organization - they are the GoDaddy of this business. (I was super pissed once they removed their status page..WTF). We hit these errors a few months ago with our clients and I put up a roadmap to move all of them off the terrible joke that Mandrill is, in under a month. None of my clients regretted the move.

I really don't miss anything about them and the market has caught up and they've been stagnant for way too long without any changes whatsoever and are still charging a premium for a prototype level quality of service.

If you're still using Mandrill in 2019, move out as soon as you can. I'm saying this with public interest as I had enough of these jokers.

[1] http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-betrayal/

Edit: I built a Mandrill clone built on SES, Phoenix/Elixir and hosted on Google AppEngine which is basically Google's managed hosting service. I moved everything there and it works pretty well, planning to open source it at some point. The awesome thing about this is I can work on some specific features my clients want that isn't available on vanilla Mandrill.

I chose this route because I lost a lot of money with Mandrill compensating my clients for their fault, so I calculated that the money I lost over time would have been the same amount if I had invested in building a Mandrill clone myself. I plan to open source it at some point.

Move to mailgun https://www.mailgun.com/

I was already angry enough when mailchimp merged mandrill with its main service

Loved mailgun when I was using it a few years ago for some small campaigns. Unfortunately the free tier service had a big problem with server reputation. A noticable amount of emails were spam-flagged or rejected by recipient systems.

Not surprising that free services would be abused, but was a little disappointing. I would assume the paid customers get servers with better reputation/history.

I had the same issue, sent an email to support and they moved us to a different node/cluster/whatever immediately. I’ve never had another problem on a free or paid tier.

This problem doesn't seem to be limited to free services or smaller companies. Mailing list stuff sent via Mailchimp often gets caught by my spam filter, and many Mailchimp IPs are on various blacklists used by spam filter software.

Not really surprising when some companies surely are using services like Mailchimp to send spam - depending on your definition of spam.

What do you recommend? I'm on their lowest cost tier and am seeing some of the issues you describe.

I moved to sendgrid when they announced mandrill's merger and have never been happier.

We moved to sendgrid around the same time. Our deliverability took a hit, and I'm not the keenest on their very narrow window of email data they keep... but no real shenanigans, very straight forward, and the one significant outage of theirs I can remember they handled it well.

SendGrid used to have a free plan but things have changed since being acquired. I moved to SendGrid anyways though and use their free 25,000 emails / month on Azure even though our app is hosted elsewhere:

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...

Funny - I was looking at SendGrid on Twitter and looks like they've had some issues themselves over the last few weeks: https://twitter.com/sendgrid_ops Did you notice anything, or were these very small outages? For all that, they've obviously been a good deal more communicative than Mandrill when they have had issues.

Their API has been very reliable for us. They do have mail delivery delays somewhat frequently (see [1]), but we rarely notice them. They are extremely communicative on their status page, at least.

[1]: http://status.sendgrid.com/history?page=1

Except now, sendgrid is merged with twilio; so... history repeating?

We use both Send Grid and Twilio. Twilio has been outstanding and their API is outstanding. I’m not worried about this merger.

No. Twilio has a status page :)

And twilio seems to be very serious about uptime. Not sure if it translated to all the facets of their business, but phone services being down will lose you customers quickly.

http://status.sendgrid.com/

They have a status page. What does Mandrill and MailChimp combining have anything to do with SendGrid and Twilio?

100% agree. Beyond the change to TOS, they also quadrupled Mandrill prices with almost no notice forcing companies with high volume to scramble (or pay massive amounts).

Don't use Mandrill or Mailchimp for anything important.

Yep, I remember they even turned off the comments on their blog for that post. I have never seen a more arrogant, scammy company than them in this vertical.

yeah i just noticed the status page was removed - it used to actually be pretty good!

What an odd trend. If anything every company is clamoring to get a status page, not remove the one they have.

Where did you move them to?

I built a Mandrill clone based on SES, Google AppEngine, Phoenix/Elixir. I moved everything there and it works pretty well, planning to open source it at some point.

How about you just open source it as a blog post and let someone else's clean it up. Heck even blogging the architecture and the issues would help.

Also are you using Amazon ses with Google app engine? Seems odd.

Google doesn't offer a transactional email service.

Google have no equivalent to ses.

That sounds awesome! Please post a show hn when you do.

Sure, thank you :)

You might have a viable saas there. Check out email octopus and moonmail (also open source)

Thank you! Moon mail looks interesting. Will check them out in detail later as to what they're using.

I really do hate posts like this.

if youre not going to name where you moved your customers too, then who cares?

Thanks for the feedback, I'll edit my post.

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