Seriously cannot trust a new product offering from anyone these days.
Newsletters and transactional emails are not the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a second monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally free until recently.
Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.
I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.
I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.
Hi - Eric from SendGrid here. We're the established company that invented the transactional category, and our transactional product is not going away anytime soon.
Our CEO Sameer just greenlit a deal for former Mandrill customers. Hopefully it helps ease the transition.
MailChimp's pricing is best suited for companies that send a lot of bulk messages to a relatively constant number of users (subscribers). This includes weekly newsletters, catalogues, etc. In order to justify the cost, you need to send at least a couple of bulk emails to your entire userbase every month.
Mandrill was best suited for companies that usually don't send anything to their entire userbase, only random notifications and verifications for individual users. This probably includes most non-annoying web services. The only time they need to notify everyone at once is if they'd had a security breach or if they're shutting down.
I'm not sure whether there's a large enough intersection between these two sets to justify treating the latter as an "add-on" to the former.
Of course it's MailChimp's decision to make, and they might have found that the first set of customers actually make them the most money. But given that people around here seem to be increasingly wary of bulk email of any kind, I wonder if that will continue to be true in the future.
This reminds me of when Urban Airship shut down their free transactional push notification service a while back. It turns out theres so much more money in the marketing side than the transactional side (profit center vs cost center), and if you're going to run a marketing company it doesn't make sense to give away a service to people who will never become the type of customer you want.
We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're coming from in this change.
I tried to sign up for Sendgrid and my account failed verification. I didn't (and still don't) want to use my company email- even though I offered to confirm that I'm a real person through it. Despite that, I got a canned response telling me to 'change my account email and update my company name' on the account, with a nice red banner telling me I 'failed provisioning'.
Especially irritating because I was just trying to troubleshoot a configuration issue for a shared customer.
Making the switch now. I send less usually 10-20 emails per month using Mandrill, no way I am paying their absurd costs and getting Mailchimp just for that. Sendgrid here I come.
It's more expensive than that for MailChimp, if I understand things correctly. On top of $20 for 25,000 emails you have to have a paid monthly MailChimp account. Or did I misunderstand something?
We support substitution tags in email templates. In other words, you can replace -name- with the name of your customer - it works a lot like {{name}} in a handlebars template.
I guess this means I will be looking for a new transactional email service. Those of you that have experience with MailGun and SendGrid, which do you prefer and why?
Does anyone have any experience with SparkPost? They seem attractive to switch from Mandrill because they also use handlebars as a templating language.
Can you elaborate? I was planning to start using Sendy, but hiding it behind a firewall seems like it would break the signups, click tracking, open tracking, etc.
Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to this service, having previously used Sendy.
Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.
I've already firewalled a completely open phpinfo page and a compatibility page leaking all my server info. Who knows what's inside the obfuscated portion. They were leaking my ip I try so hard to hide for cloudflare.
Yes firewall all in is necessary. Outgoing only to Amazon. I don't have a perfect solution. A vm will stop full backdoor.
Sendgrid is currently free, may have better transactional deliverability, much quicker using system wide ssmtp vs aws libraries at that time, I didn't have to change anything php side
Do any other providers offer CSS inlining? This has been a great Mandrill feature. I have a number of domains all sending only few 100 emails/month, but the formatting is important. The cost jump to MailChimp monthly + Mandrill is tremendous.
So my move to shift with services like Easysendy Pro which connects to multiple SMTP relay services and manages all my newsletter and templates was worthful.
Also they will be connecting my subscribers to push and social notifications soon.
Newsletters and transactional emails are not the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a second monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally free until recently.
Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.
I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.
I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.