Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp | Hacker News Reader

Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

mandrill.com

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Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

So how does this compare to something like SendGrid? More or less a direct competitor? I noticed you can only send mail via the API (no SMTP relay). Any other notable differences?

Cancel that -- you CAN do a simple SMTP relay. Looks like a solid service. I'll consider switching. Your free plan is about twice what SendGrid offers.

One thing to not is that mandrill has a limit of 25/day.

We're trying to make Mandrill a stable email platform for all uses, so in that way we're similar to SendGrid. Where we're really trying to focus isn't so much in just the delivery of the email, though we do have a ton of experience doing that well.

Mandrill is a product that is trying to make your application-driven emails as easily tracked, tested, and understood as the bulk email you'd send using MailChimp. It's still early days for the product and we're still iterating rapidly, but that's where we're trying to get.

We're also integrated with MailChimp itself. We've got a big discount for paid MailChimp users that want to use Mandrill, and you can share templates between Mandrill and MailChimp easily. We'll be integrating more deeply in the future - really trying to make a one-stop shop for email-related needs for businesses.

I think deep integration with MailChimp is a huge reason to use Mandrill. I'm not and have never been a paid MailChimp customer, but this might get me there.

I currently use MailGun for transactional e-mail, and CampaignMonitor for marketing e-mail. MailGun's UI is really rough, so Mandrill is pulling me in for that reason alone, and CampaignMonitor pretty great but I haven't use it lately any way.

Have you considered discounts for developers deploying individual accounts for clients?

We've considered it, but we're still working on our reseller/integrator story.

For auditing purposes I need to record individual email bounces. Do you have an api or reporting feature that does that?

Seems you can set up webhooks to do just that! [1]

These are the events: send, hard_bounce, soft_bounce, open, click, spam, unsub, reject

[1] http://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/webhooks.html#method=add

The API doc does not make it clear if I am getting the recipient, subject line, and bounce type back.

You do get all the information we have on the message and the bounce. Recipient, sender, subject line, bounce info, tags, etc.

First of all congratulations! I was hoping you would be developing such a product after I saw last year's announcement on STS. One question, is there a ruby gem to work with the API coming up, or is it left up to the internet to develop that?

edit: Missed it, seems it is being worked on: http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/464808-api...

Hi Chad,

Just gave it a quick spin here and we got the SMTP relay working and tracking e-mails within 2 minutes. Very impressive. We'll play around with the API soon, it looks promising :)

For DKIM Customization, I assume we can use FREE + a $29.95 dedicated IP plan?

You can customize DKIM without a dedicated IP. You do need to have a paid plan to get the dedicated IP, but that's really because you need at least a few hundred thousand emails per month of volume before getting a dedicated IP. With lower volumes (like anything that can fit in the free plan), the sending reputation of one of our shared IP addresses is certainly better than a dedicated IP with no reputation.

Both MailChimp and Mandrill look great, but I have a pricing question. Is it possible to use Mandrill to send out newsletters since your Mandrill pricing is WAY cheaper than your pay as you go newsletter pricing?

I've been looking for a newsletter service that charges me reasonable rates for pay as you go sending of a monthly/semi-monthly email newsletter, using the pay as you go product, it would cost me $30 per 1,000 emails, whereas Mandrill's per email rates start around $0.90 per 1,000. You say that both are using the same infrastructure, so why is sending email newsletters with MailChimp 33x more expensive?

I can't speak for MailChimp, but bulk e-mail requires a lot more managing - particularly for spam - than transactional.

Yes - you can use Mandrill for newsletters if you want to code your own subscription logic and store your own list of emails. MailChimp is quite a bit more expensive than Mandrill, but it does a lot more too. MailChimp stores more analytics than Mandrill does and stores it longer. It handles scheduling, batch testing, social integrations and content management in ways that Mandrill really doesn't. MailChimp also has analytics and profiles for list subscribers that Mandrill doesn't have.

If Mandrill does everything you need it to do and you can do the rest on your own, you should use Mandrill. It is, as you note, much cheaper.

How are unsubscribes handled? I see in the activity there is a filter for unsubscribes but do not see any reference in the docs of how to handle.

It's really simple right now. We add a List-Unsubscribe header to each email which in supporting email clients (like gmail) adds an unsubscribe button to the report spam button that's always there. If the recipient unsubscribes in that way, we treat it as an unsubscribe. The more traditional subscription model isn't supported by Mandrill at this time. You'd need to build your own or use MailChimp for that. I recommend MailChimp, it's pretty good at handling subscription-based email like that ;)

It seems as if there are two sides of the fence with supporting unsubscribes from transaction emails.

Do you have any input regarding this?

Well, supporting unsubscribes in transactional emails can sometimes make sense, like with notification or confirmation emails where the user might want the option to not receive them. With others, like receipts or signup confirmations it makes less sense. For now, we presume that you're going to do the right thing and implement unsubscribes if it makes sense for the emails you're sending. We've got a feature coming to make that process easier, but it's still going to be a decision that the sender is going to need to make.

Is the inbound email support documented at all?

http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/search?q=i... doesn't look very promising.

I've tried to sign up but you wouldn't take my password ("the input must contain at least one number or symbol"). Although a minimum length make sense, requiring a symbol doesn't. Would be great if you could remove it!

See this for discussions on the subject: http://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165 http://xkcd.com/936/

I've not tried to signup but according to the error you're reporting, you must either have a number OR a symbol, so you're not required to put a symbol. Having said that, have you ever tried to fulfil the requirements for a strong Active Directory password? :)

What is "transactional email" ?

I suppose something that carries some operational information and/or that is worth to be tracked, like "you've subscribed to our service", "your order is ready for shipping", "this is your password reset link", "your credit card has been charged.." etc opposed to mails like "hi Deb, how was the party last night?" that are merely informative / casual conversation (of course nothing stops you from sending this kind of mails with "transactional mail providers" and keepin track of relative metrics :))

Another distinction is that you typically send transaction email to a single person, because some transaction has happened. Bulk email you send a (perhaps customized) email to an entire list of recipients in one go.

After looking at ten other transactional email service providers, I picked Mandrill for the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app built for the RailsApps project. The benefits are the generous free plan, the easy integration with Rails, and the integration with MailChimp. So far, so good, though a few users were confused when they tried to use the same API keys for MailChimp and Mandrill. If you want to see how to set up Rails with Mandrill (and MailChimp), see the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app: http://railsapps.github.com/rails-prelaunch-signup/.

Am I the only one unable to get the page to load at all?

Probably. An obligatory reference to downornot - http://www.downornot.com/mandrill

do not work for me as well

Anyone know what they are using to generate their docs?

They wrote back to my inquiry. It's totally custom, not easy to release open source and doesn't seem like they intend to.

Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al).

If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?

There are a few things that we think set Mandrill apart from the pack. Our application is designed with responsiveness in mind, and we have mobile application on both of the major platforms so you can get access to your email stats and reputation wherever you are. We have search and analytics deeply ingrained in the application in a way that is fairly unique - letting you see your emails in context and trying to derive the context for you when we can. We also integrate deeply with the main MailChimp product. They use the same underlying delivery engine, the same templating and content personalization systems, and we have a heavy discount for users of both products.

Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it to email more broadly.

Does the Mandrill inbound email system parse out quoted text?

Not yet. The inbound system right now is really basic - we'll parse out the messages and deliver them to a webhook, but we won't munge it much beyond breaking apart attachments and things.

So the pricing is flat rate? No difference for inbound emails?

Yes - the pricing is flat rate. Right now charging for inbound emails is turned off since the feature is so new and basic, but inbound emails will be indexed and tracked the same as outbound emails, so they'll be charged the same.

Looks great. Currently in the process of building a new application using Postmark, will certainly evaluate a switch. The pricing certainly blows Postmark out of the water.

Are you guys using anything in particular to power the webhooks?

I'll be integrating webhooks in my own app soon so I'm quite interested how others have 'solved' that so to speak.

We built on top of our own internal job scheduling systems that we use for email to handle retries, batching, and concurrency handling so we don't overwhelm your servers. It's all custom stuff, though.

Mandrills honestly scare the hell out of me - they are vicious animals. I'm sure most people don't have that association though...

That's one of the reasons we chose that name for the brand. Since Mandrill is an infrastructure service, we wanted it to feel more serious and aggressive than MailChimp.

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