Mandrill’s Betrayal
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Mandrill’s Betrayal
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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#2This indignation seems a bit oversold. Part of that is quoting the bulk prohibition on Mandrill without quoting the explanation that immediately follows:
Mandrill is designed for transactional email. Please use MailChimp for your bulk sending needs.
Anyone who was using Mandrill for bulk mailing will now need to use MailChimp, which should have been the case anyway. Maybe someone misunderstood the different purposes of the two services, but misunderstanding happens, and it's a two-way street.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#3> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically.
I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around some of Mailchimp's pricing structure, and now that has come to an end.
That said, I will agree that the change has come rather abruptly.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#4> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically. I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around…
That is largely correct.
It was intended as a purely transaction / alerting / etc. mail platform and not for bulk/marketing emails.
However, I never went over the free limits with that sort of mail which I suspect was the problem. My guess is 90% of the revenue was people using it for bulk email and so they figure forcing them to MailChimp isn't a major loss.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#5We were using Mandrill's email to HTTP feature for delivering inbound emails into our web services. The cutover period for needing to be a paying Mailchimp is April 27th, so we had two months to convert. Luckily it took less than a day to build and test the same functionality using Amazon SES, so we've already converted away. To be fair, it was functionality we were using completely for free, so I expected it to happen sooner rather than later.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#6> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically. I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around…
Mailchimp doesn't exactly do "bulk emails", they do newsletters.
There are lots of things that fall in between say a weekly email to 5k people (typical newsletter email) and a password reset (typical transactional email) that people used Mandrill for and now are rightly pissed.
I have a friend with a service that sends out 10k-ish customized mealplans each week to their paying customers (each email is fairly unique given where they are at in the customer cycle, preferences, tracking, etc.)
It's deeply tied into the rest of their infrastructure and Mandrill worked great for them, but Mailchimp definitely does not as it's not a newsletter.
Or imagine something like a system that alerts people when X band announces a concert date in Y town. Lots of people subscribe to get an email notification about that so it's 1 email to 500 people in Duluth. Not exactly a newsletter, not exactly transactional.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#7> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically. I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around…
Mailchimp doesn't exactly do "bulk emails", they do newsletters. There are lots of things that fall in between say a weekly email to 5k people (typical newsletter email) and a password reset (typical transactional email) that people used Mandrill for and now are rightly pissed. I have a friend with a service that sends out 10k-ish customized mealplans each week to their paying customers (each email is fairly unique g…
> Or imagine something like a system that alerts people when X band announces a concert date in Y town. Lots of people subscribe to get an email notification about that so it's 1 email to 500 people in Duluth. Not exactly a newsletter, not exactly transactional.
That is bulk email, fyi.
> I have a friend with a service that sends out 10k-ish customized mealplans each week to their paying customers (each email is fairly unique given where they are at in the customer cycle, preferences, tracking, etc.)
This was still a bulk email based on when I talked to Mandrill about it when I initially set it up.
> Thanks for getting in touch! It's primarily designed to support transactional emails, you can send any legal, non-spam message through Mandrill as long as it maps 1:1 with a human interaction and/or alert from an automated event.
That is a literal quote I had from the support ticket when I created my Mandrill account. Both you and the OP didn't follow what I [or the Mandrill/Mailchimp employee I talked to] interpreted the ToS as.
Similarly the OP seems to be the same usecase:
> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically.
They told you it was for transactional email. I'm not sure how you concluded that meant "bulk mail" was okay.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#8As a replacement consider mailgun (http://www.mailgun.com). I have used their free tier before when I had to send mail for a side project.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#9This has impacted our platform as well. While the Mandrill API is still operational at the moment, the immediate change in TOS means that we were technically in violation of the terms before we were even notified that there was a change.
> You can no longer use it to send mail on behalf of your users, as in a contact form processor or white labeled service.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#10I hated this change, and switched to Mailgun immediately. I never liked mailchimp at all, and this sealed the deal.