I was going to use Mandrill/Mailchimp until this fiasco. I discovered SendGrid, which has quite a lot of great features. Their free tier is pretty generous with 12k emails a month. I recommend them to people looking for an alternative to Mandrill.
Mandrill’s Betrayal
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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#22I switched my MVP to AWS SES yesterday after having used Mandrill for transactional emails for about a year. I almost decided to just pay the $20/mo for a MailChimp plan because of SES's documentation and setup complexity and the annoyance of the sandbox (you can only send mail to and from pre-verified email addresses while in the sandbox).
However, I filed the support ticket to get out of the sandbox, requesting 2.5K daily emails. They approved it several hours later with 50K daily emails (!), so they are quite generous there - I was worried I'd have to keep an eye on the number of emails I'm sending, but the amount they gave me gives a nice buffer.
edit: Just to add, I'm one of those people that would religiously open spam emails and look for the relay, and if they're reputable like Mandrill or SendGrid, I'd go to their abuse page and report the email by pasting the email headers. Extrapolating from how many spam mailing lists I got added onto by recruiters, I can see how MailChimp employees' time could get sucked up investigating a lot of these spammers who probably slummed off the free or low cost tiers, and could damage their bounce rates.
So I can't totally blame them for this move w.r.t. Mandrill, and I still plan on using MailChimp when I have a need to send marketing emails to my users.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#23It'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 sig…
Other mail services can do the same. It's funny we have not fixed the problem of free mail, i.e. any one should be able to run a mail server anywhere and expect delivery of their mail. We should just do a better job of filtering spam and bad users, but mail should still be able to leave any server and be delivered to any other address.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#24I feel bad for the people forced to switch due to various reasons. The Mailgun guys were always extremely helpful when we used them and often went way above and beyond in helping us debug mail issues. Also, their webhook API is great when you need to accept large attachments.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206251597-Wha...
> What types of email can I send with Mandrill?
> But you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#26> 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.
Oh, and the pricing page that's live right now is a bald faced lie. I wouldn't trust much/anything from these guys.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#27Another alternative when looking for the absolute lowest price is sendy.co.
It's a self hosted solution that connects with Amazon email services.
Does anyone have any experience with Sendy.co? And how it would compare with mailgun for deliverability?
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#28It'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 sig…
Other mail services can do the same. It's funny we have not fixed the problem of free mail, i.e. any one should be able to run a mail server anywhere and expect delivery of their mail. We should just do a better job of filtering spam and bad users, but mail should still be able to leave any server and be delivered to any other address.
Just to be clear: I'm happy paying a premium for all the great features services like SendGrid/Mandrill offer. We knew about cheaper services like SES, or the ability to roll our own, but we didn't want to re-invent the wheel.
I'm not happy about them quadrupling their prices, with a ridiculously short deadline to avoid it.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#29Can someone explain to me why they would do this ? I cannot think of a reason why they would stop providing this service.
Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal
#30I switched my MVP to AWS SES yesterday after having used Mandrill for transactional emails for about a year. I almost decided to just pay the $20/mo for a MailChimp plan because of SES's documentation and setup complexity and the annoyance of the sandbox (you can only send mail to and from pre-verified email addresses while in the sandbox). However, I filed the support ticket to get out of the sandbox, requesting 2.5…
Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from most spam filters?