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Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

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Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#21
post #5

I don't care about Mandrill (who uses it, anyway), but deeply concerned if I should expect same quality, incident response and attitude to customers from parent company — Mailchimp.

You most definitely should expect this and much worse from MailChimp - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#22
post #4
post #2

Disclaimer: it's my tweet that is linked in this story, and I submitted it. There's no news story as far as I know. Better links are appreciated. Mandrill stopped delivering email at 04:51 UTC on the 4th of February. Nobody knows whether the received emails are lost, what the cause is, how soon any change will occur. It took Mandrill over 9 hours to acknowledge the issue. They are posting the same message over and ov…

We're currently using Mandrill to send outbound emails, although we've had issues with some API calls, all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered. Certain things like viewing email content look broken on certain emails which doesn't hurt the business, yet... It's true though that this service is nearing death as hasn't had an update to any of its features since it merge with Mailchimp. Looking to change serv…

The weirdest UX problem I've found with Mandrill is that you can't use the browser "CTRL-F" to search an email template unless the text is _currently_ visible. Not sure how they manged to mess up the search functionality for a text box that is intended to have massive amounts of text in it. It makes it harder to do a minor spot edit of a template than it should be. Things begin to make sense now...

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#23
post #4
post #2

Disclaimer: it's my tweet that is linked in this story, and I submitted it. There's no news story as far as I know. Better links are appreciated. Mandrill stopped delivering email at 04:51 UTC on the 4th of February. Nobody knows whether the received emails are lost, what the cause is, how soon any change will occur. It took Mandrill over 9 hours to acknowledge the issue. They are posting the same message over and ov…

We're currently using Mandrill to send outbound emails, although we've had issues with some API calls, all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered. Certain things like viewing email content look broken on certain emails which doesn't hurt the business, yet... It's true though that this service is nearing death as hasn't had an update to any of its features since it merge with Mailchimp. Looking to change serv…

A few years ago when Mandrill dramatically increased prices there was a big exodus of HN users. I solicited pricing and transition info from a number of different providers and summarized it here[0].

[0] http://gabe.durazo.us/tech/hacker-news-mandrill-followup/

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#24
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not AWS SES?

AWS SES doesn't have things like reporting, bounce handling etc. out of the box - you need to set up all of that yourself (or at least you did when I last looked at it a few years ago).

This was all still true ~6 months ago. Compared to Mailchimp and friends, SES is _very_ low level.

The other things I found really frustrating about SES were: templates had to be defined inline in a JSON file and then sent to SES via the AWS CLI. So, since there's is no online/visual editor, copy changes and the like required a developer to rebuild/sanitize/minify the template source and then update it via the AWS CLI.

It also took _way_ longer than it should have to have our rate limit bumped up to a reasonable level. IIRC, it took ~one week for my request to be processed (after submitting proof that we owned the domain, etc.) and it was only after a fit on twitter that AWS Support followed up with me and escalated the issue.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#25
post #4
post #2

Disclaimer: it's my tweet that is linked in this story, and I submitted it. There's no news story as far as I know. Better links are appreciated. Mandrill stopped delivering email at 04:51 UTC on the 4th of February. Nobody knows whether the received emails are lost, what the cause is, how soon any change will occur. It took Mandrill over 9 hours to acknowledge the issue. They are posting the same message over and ov…

We're currently using Mandrill to send outbound emails, although we've had issues with some API calls, all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered. Certain things like viewing email content look broken on certain emails which doesn't hurt the business, yet... It's true though that this service is nearing death as hasn't had an update to any of its features since it merge with Mailchimp. Looking to change serv…

Take a look at MJML.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#26
post #10

We moved over to SES a long time ago. Mandrill was basically the cheapest game in town, but their terrible service coupled with Mailchimp essentially abandoning the platform after their acquisition made us jump ship. I feel bad for anyone still using their service.

Depends on your volume. Mandril has a monthly fee and thanks to pay as you go pricing SES is cheaper up to a decent volume for a lot of startups sending just transactional email.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#27
Unfortunately this is standard MailChimp way of doing things ever since they screwed over paying customers and merged with Mandrill [1].

They are the opposite of a transparent organization - they are the GoDaddy of this business. (I was super pissed once they removed their status page..WTF). We hit these errors a few months ago with our clients and I put up a roadmap to move all of them off the terrible joke that Mandrill is, in under a month. None of my clients regretted the move.

I really don't miss anything about them and the market has caught up and they've been stagnant for way too long without any changes whatsoever and are still charging a premium for a prototype level quality of service.

If you're still using Mandrill in 2019, move out as soon as you can. I'm saying this with public interest as I had enough of these jokers.

[1] http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-betrayal/

Edit: I built a Mandrill clone built on SES, Phoenix/Elixir and hosted on Google AppEngine which is basically Google's managed hosting service. I moved everything there and it works pretty well, planning to open source it at some point. The awesome thing about this is I can work on some specific features my clients want that isn't available on vanilla Mandrill.

I chose this route because I lost a lot of money with Mandrill compensating my clients for their fault, so I calculated that the money I lost over time would have been the same amount if I had invested in building a Mandrill clone myself. I plan to open source it at some point.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#28

Things like this influence stakeholder decisions down the road. I've been evaluating migrating to Mandrill for some time to give our designer more control over transactional emails. Now, it's unlikely that I'll do so. (Worth noting, that I'm a happy long-time Mailchimp customer)

We used Mandrill for some time, then moved to SendGrid, and just recently have moved again to Postmark because we were seeing delivery issues. FWIW, Postmark has been fantastic.

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#29
We use Mandrill to get inbound emails into our support ticketing system. This incident has pushed me in the direction of switching to ZenDesk or something... but according to their status page, they also lost inbound emails yesterday. Coincidence or is it Mandrill all the way down?

Re: Mandrill has been down for over 30 hours with no explanation

#30
post #4
post #2

Disclaimer: it's my tweet that is linked in this story, and I submitted it. There's no news story as far as I know. Better links are appreciated. Mandrill stopped delivering email at 04:51 UTC on the 4th of February. Nobody knows whether the received emails are lost, what the cause is, how soon any change will occur. It took Mandrill over 9 hours to acknowledge the issue. They are posting the same message over and ov…

We're currently using Mandrill to send outbound emails, although we've had issues with some API calls, all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered. Certain things like viewing email content look broken on certain emails which doesn't hurt the business, yet... It's true though that this service is nearing death as hasn't had an update to any of its features since it merge with Mailchimp. Looking to change serv…

Can't recommend Foundation for Emails highly enough for rendering html. I found it super easy to use (Moustache templates) and very flexible for managing multiple versions (translations) of a newsletter.

The assignment I had was to write, coordinate translations, produce and send a quarterly newsletter with anywhere between 20 and 35 translations per issue + optional separate content to be included on a country-to-country basis. Production time from drafted newsletter to final send was about 2 weeks.

The Foundation tool felt to me a little like jekyll for email. I had a a lot of fun with it.

https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/docs/

Disclaimer: I have no connection to Foundation. Just a delighted user.

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