Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

by po • 14 years ago

62 45 14 years ago

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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?

brittohalloran2• 14 years ago

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.

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

megaman8212• 14 years ago

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

bittersweet2• 14 years ago

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

dlib• 14 years ago

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...

ErikGelderblom• 14 years ago

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 :)

tszming• 14 years ago

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

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

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?

ceejayoz2• 14 years ago

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

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

smcguinness2• 14 years ago

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.

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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 ;)

rberdeen• 14 years ago

Is the inbound email support documented at all?

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

sandstrom• 14 years ago

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/

Ecio782• 14 years ago

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? :)

listic• 14 years ago

What is "transactional email" ?

Ecio782• 14 years ago

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 :))

cschmidt• 14 years ago

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.

bittersweet2• 14 years ago

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.

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

klbarry• 14 years ago

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

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

ceejayoz2• 14 years ago

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

ark15• 14 years ago

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

hippich• 14 years ago

do not work for me as well

zbailey• 14 years ago

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?

cmorrisrsg13• 14 years ago

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.

grease• 14 years ago

Does the Mandrill inbound email system parse out quoted text?

agotterer2• 14 years ago

Anyone know what they are using to generate their docs?

agotterer2• 14 years ago

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

vailripper• 14 years ago

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.

DanielKehoe• 14 years ago

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/.

Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

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