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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

#31

Post by zbentley »

adnans wrote: post #4
slau wrote: 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…

> Mandrill has a `render` endpoint which makes this easy. None of the others have this yet.

Klaviyo provides similar functionality: https://www.klaviyo.com/docs/api/email-templates

Disclaimer: I work at Klaviyo.

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

#32

Post by f3r3nc »

jrockway wrote: post #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?

We have issues with both. Some emails do go out, some not. No inbound.

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

#33

Post by kawsper »

Just remember that you can't trust their interface, even though their Outbound page says "Delivered" it isn't delivered unless there are SMTP events attached, if it looks like this, your email is queued, not sent: https://cdn.servnice.com/screenie/c1Og3TcrkLFV9Hg.jpg

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

#34

Post by kawsper »

adnans wrote: post #4
slau wrote: 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…

> all the outbound emails we sent have been delivered.

You can't trust their interface during these outages, we have been there before, even though their Outbound page says "Delivered" it isn't unless there are SMTP events attached, if it looks like this, your email is queued, not sent: https://cdn.servnice.com/screenie/c1Og3TcrkLFV9Hg.jpg

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

#36

Post by mountainofdeath »

ethagnawl wrote: post #24
frereubu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 CL…

Amazon SES is supposed to be strictly transactional email. Using it for anything else isn't really the intended purpose.

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

#37

Post by jdc0589 »

jdc0589 wrote: post #14

> MOST outbound emails are sending oh, so normal operation then

for context: here's a partial view of our outbound error rate over the past 60 hours (this is maybe ~30% of all total mandrill errors): https://puu.sh/CHDxb/729e52451f.png. We see around a 2% failure rate in Mandrill requests on a normal day though, its bad enough we do two immediate retries before allowing our queuing system to start handling retries with backoff.

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

#38

Post by bvm »

slau wrote: post #9
adnans wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, outbound has been solid for us, too. The issue is inbound. We literally have hundreds if not thousands of customer support agents unable to work because of this.

I've had lots of issues with outbound. Bulk sends failing completely. Individual seems to work but is very slow.

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

#39

Post by super-serial »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #36
ethagnawl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 CL…

Amazon SES is supposed to be strictly transactional email. Using it for anything else isn't really the intended purpose.

No it's not. Right on the homepage they say it can be used for marketing emails including newsletters: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

If someone has different info let me know... we're migrating off Mailchimp and already have some of our newsletters on SES at work.

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

#40

Post by adnans »

moltar wrote: post #25
adnans wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Already using MJML to design email templates and wrapping tags around Mailchimp conditional tags like IF:SOMETHING .. |END:IF|. I guess it's time to render the html emails ourselves, merge with params and then use whatever other third party transactional email service.
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