Hacker News Reader

Comment by yawnxyz | Hacker News Reader

I didn't even know Mailchimp supported transactional emails. I thought it was for newsletters and stuff.

It's kind of funny that Mailchimp treats a company as large as Digital Ocean as if they're a one person newsletter.

They had another product called Mandrill that did transactional email, they discontinued it, but also allowed old customers (which also paid big $$$) to keep using Mandrill, perhaps that is what DO used?

We left Mandrill because they had a DB failure which took them a long time to recover, and we felt that all their focus were on newsletters, and that transactional email didn't get any attention.

Tried Mandrill/Mailchimp transactional email earlier this year and it was trash, we already had an established marketing account and they insta banned me for sending a single test email to myself before we even started using it. They flagged the account for "suspicious access" with no way to resolve even though I followed all their steps.

It seems that most of these transactional email companies concept of "100% delivery guarantee" excludes you from that guarantee... they aggressively and pre-emptively protect their servers from being blacklisted by autoblocking you first based on some heuristics and then very slowly or possibly never unblocking you manually later through useless support staff. Guilty until proven innocent.

Settled on Postmark (after trying pretty much all the popular transactional mail services without success), which has so far been golden, customer support will actually help you resolve an issue if there is one, plenty of forewarning with transparency before any blocking, the front end is exemplary of clear usable UX. It also lets you sandbox transactional mail into "servers" so that one bad source can't affect another.

We also ended up with Postmark (after an unresolved security incident with Sendgrid) and it wasn't easy to setup multiple domains with Mailgun.

You’re right, they mention Mandrill in the article.

I didn’t realise they’d discontinued it. I remember there being an uproar some years back when they ditched the free tier and made entry level pricing $20/mo.

Or was that Mailgun? We'd used and got frustrated with each, so could be both!

Mailgun was the service a number of my clients flocked to when Mandrill went paid-only.

Free options seem to be drying up.

Since then Mailgun also went paid-only, but it’s still practically free. They don’t send an invoice unless it’s over a certain amount, and mine never are.

I was evaluating Mailchimp for my newsletters at that time. They basically put all the features I was using behind a paywall without notice forcing me to pay that fee. Since I only have a small number of subscribers, It was at that point I started to rethink using a SAAS solution for that purpose and went back to sending newsletters from my Mail client.

They have a fairly extensive API, I used it in a small business, my main problem with them was they kind of just sat on their laurels and didn't keep up with other companies in the space. Once you get a few thousand contacts (who in our case were very casual "want to keep up but don't want to buy a lot" low-dollar-value types), you're paying a large sum for a lot less than competitors give you with a full marketing automation suite. We've since frozen the account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com