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Mandrill’s Betrayal

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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#12

Post by brightball »

jessaustin wrote: post #2

This 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…

Not necessarily. Mailchimp is incredibly overpriced for what it does once you get past the lowest price levels. Signing up for Mandrill or Sendgrid or Mailgun, then using one of dozens of self-hosted newsletter options (some free, some one time paid with support) is much more cost effective. For really high volume just install your own licensed PowerMTA server from Port25, which is what Mandrill runs on anyway if I'm not mistaken.

The part of the service that you're paying for with Mailchimp is the actual delivery management, which virtually any of the existing transactional email systems including SES can undercut on price almost overnight.

That's one reason I never touched Mandrill because the low end pricing model didn't make sense for a company like Mailchimp with such a high price point for it's own services.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#14

Post by clupprich »

adenner wrote: post #8

As 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.

+1 for mailgun. Their API is awesome and they even offer things click tracking (also in their API).

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#15

Post by scosman »

It's way worse than just the TOS change. Mandrill has a lot of advanced features (webhooks, reporting, AB testing, templates, etc). Some companies may be able to switch to SES or mailgun in a day, but more advanced integrations could take weeks. We're stuck with either pulling people off critical project in order to meet their ridiculously short deadline, or pay insane bills (the new price is over 4x the price we signed up for).

I emailed their founders and never received a reply.

Lesson learned: do not take a dependancy on MailChimp for any reason.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#16

Post by ceejayoz »

paulbennett wrote: post #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…

> I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails.

https://www.mandrill.com/about/

"Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters."

So, their About page is currently explicitly condoning violating their own Terms of Service.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#17

Post by woodcut »

In a previous job we tried to mimic Mediums "email only - no password" login infrastructure using mandrill. Whereby a user clicks 'login', a session token is generated and a link sent in an email, the user clicks it and is then logged in - no password needed. sounds great...

It turned out that in production, even after all the hoops that were there to be jumped the bounce rate was around 5% and some of the messages that did get through took around ~15 mins to turn up in the users inbox.

I don't think much of this is Mandrills fault but up to that point i had little inkling of how bad email is for communicating en mass.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#18

Post by ceejayoz »

jessaustin wrote: post #2

This 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…

Part of the indignation is that Mandrill's About page still says:

> Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters.

http://mandrill.com/about/

and:

> you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too

https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206251597-Wha...

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#19

Post by zwerdlds »

ceejayoz wrote: post #16
paulbennett wrote: post #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…

> I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not bulk emails. https://www.mandrill.com/about/ "Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters ." So, their About page is currently explicitly condoning violating their own Terms of Service.

Not sure if that's really true. Non-bulk marketing and newsletter emails are a thing.
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