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Comment by cmorrisrsg | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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...

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? :)

Is the inbound email support documented at all?

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

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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