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Mandrill’s Betrayal

dangrossman.info

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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#31

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

What pissed me off the most about this change is that Mandrill was specifically marketed as a separate product, something they believed in. We had no reason to suspect MailChimp didn't actually care for the market they were operating in.

Now MailChimp have come out and said something along the lines of "Sure, it made us lots of money. But we never really cared about you or your use case. So we're killing the product."

It is for this reason I have lost respect for MailChimp. Quite frankly, they can't be trusted.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#32

Post by tdaltonc »

misiti3780 wrote: post #29

Can someone explain to me why they would do this ? I cannot think of a reason why they would stop providing this service.

They've making an 80/20 decision. Make the service better for the 20% of users that produce 80% of your revenue and price everyone else out. They don't want to be the startup economies dumb email tube. They want to be a high margin service for companies with more marketers or designers than programers.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#33

Post by ianamartin »

clupprich wrote: post #14
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).

Another vote for Mailgun. I use them for all my side projects, monitoring, error reports, basically everything gets hooked into my FastMail account with all the right aliases I need, and it works very well.

I've never gone over my free allocation even when I have a dozen or so side projects up and testing.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#34

Post by dangrossman »

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…

MailChimp is designed for sending newsletters to predefined lists, not bulk mail in general. They're not the same thing.

If you've built a monitoring tool that needs to notify 5 employees that their server has just gone down, you needed Mandrill, not MailChimp. These mails are "transactional" the same way a password reset is: they're programmatic responses to some event. They're also bulk, and if all 5 employees get the same message, now prohibited.

Mandrill was always for programmatic mail of any kind, not just one-to-one. Bulk mail was all over their sales material and knowledgebase. The context that separated Mandrill from MailChimp was that the mail is programmatic or automatic, rather than a newsletter you pre-write for a pre-made list. Their raison d’être was to provide reliable e-mail delivery for developers, regardless of what you were sending, up until last week.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#35

Post by waffle_ss »

tdaltonc wrote: post #30
waffle_ss wrote: post #22

I 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?

I think most generic EC2 instances you'd spin up are hopelessly blacklisted, but I would hope that SES would be less affected by that since AWS would keep its address ranges separated from the EC2 wild west.

But after Googling SES deliverability it seems like SES may have suffered a slight amount from some lax spam reporting standards - the results seem a bit stale so not sure how valid it is any more. Hopefully using DKIM and SPF will help lessen the blow.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#36

Post by ceejayoz »

tdaltonc wrote: post #30
waffle_ss wrote: post #22

I 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?

EC2's IP range is scorched earth, yes.

SES is in a separate set of IP ranges, and their feedback loops with major ISPs lets Amazon manage their reputation much more closely.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#37

Post by zwerdlds »

ceejayoz wrote: post #25
zwerdlds wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Additionally, > View our Terms of Use for extra details.

It seems like this change is to avoid being on the hook for those non-{legal, non-spam} emails.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#38

Post by kidcoach »

fweespeech wrote: post #4
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…

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.

This has to be the goal of the change. Move people who into paying mailchimp customers who are taking advantage of mandrill. The issue is they alienate all the people who's problem set doesn't fall into mailchimp's offering. Who knows what that percentage is but my guess is over 80%, so they understand they are screwing over the majority to make a profit off the minority. This is from Ben at mandrill:

> "I can say today that–believe it or not–there is a subset of Mandrill customers who want combined functionality and pricing, so it’s not as illogical as it seems on the surface (also, we’ve lost many more potential customers like these by having two separate products and brands). There’s another subset who want a utlitarian service provider, and who would understandably find the new pricing unsuitable."

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#39

Post by aquark »

ceejayoz wrote: post #36
tdaltonc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from most spam filters?

EC2's IP range is scorched earth, yes. SES is in a separate set of IP ranges, and their feedback loops with major ISPs lets Amazon manage their reputation much more closely.

True, but we switched from SES to Mandrill because of delivery problems from SES.

Mandrill was way better, but now it looks like we need to move again. (And our complaint % on Mandrill was somewhere around 0.01%)

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#40

Post by wnscooke »

tdburn wrote: post #27

Another 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?

It has been great for me. Set it up on a DO droplet, somehow worked my through the Amazon setup and voila, my own sendy instance! It's tracking is excellent. And the guy behind it responds quite promptly to any issues. I'd say go for it.
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