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Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

mandrill.com

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Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#11

Post by dlib »

cmorrisrsg wrote: post #2

Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

First of all congratulations! I was hoping you would be developing such a product after I saw last year's announcement on STS. One question, is there a ruby gem to work with the API coming up, or is it left up to the internet to develop that?

edit: Missed it, seems it is being worked on: http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/464808-api...

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#12

Post by cmorrisrsg »

megaman821 wrote: post #9
bittersweet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you can set up webhooks to do just that! [1] These are the events: send, hard_bounce, soft_bounce, open, click, spam, unsub, reject [1] http://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/webhooks.html#method=add

The API doc does not make it clear if I am getting the recipient, subject line, and bounce type back.

You do get all the information we have on the message and the bounce. Recipient, sender, subject line, bounce info, tags, etc.

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#13

Post by cmorrisrsg »

bittersweet wrote: post #8

Are you guys using anything in particular to power the webhooks? I'll be integrating webhooks in my own app soon so I'm quite interested how others have 'solved' that so to speak.

We built on top of our own internal job scheduling systems that we use for email to handle retries, batching, and concurrency handling so we don't overwhelm your servers. It's all custom stuff, though.

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#14

Post by cmorrisrsg »

klbarry wrote: post #10

Mandrills honestly scare the hell out of me - they are vicious animals. I'm sure most people don't have that association though...

That's one of the reasons we chose that name for the brand. Since Mandrill is an infrastructure service, we wanted it to feel more serious and aggressive than MailChimp.

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#16

Post by zbailey »

Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al).

If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#17

Post by cmorrisrsg »

brittohalloran wrote: post #3
cmorrisrsg wrote: post #2

Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

So how does this compare to something like SendGrid? More or less a direct competitor? I noticed you can only send mail via the API (no SMTP relay). Any other notable differences?

We're trying to make Mandrill a stable email platform for all uses, so in that way we're similar to SendGrid. Where we're really trying to focus isn't so much in just the delivery of the email, though we do have a ton of experience doing that well.

Mandrill is a product that is trying to make your application-driven emails as easily tracked, tested, and understood as the bulk email you'd send using MailChimp. It's still early days for the product and we're still iterating rapidly, but that's where we're trying to get.

We're also integrated with MailChimp itself. We've got a big discount for paid MailChimp users that want to use Mandrill, and you can share templates between Mandrill and MailChimp easily. We'll be integrating more deeply in the future - really trying to make a one-stop shop for email-related needs for businesses.

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#18

Post by cmorrisrsg »

zbailey wrote: post #16

Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al). If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?

There are a few things that we think set Mandrill apart from the pack. Our application is designed with responsiveness in mind, and we have mobile application on both of the major platforms so you can get access to your email stats and reputation wherever you are. We have search and analytics deeply ingrained in the application in a way that is fairly unique - letting you see your emails in context and trying to derive the context for you when we can. We also integrate deeply with the main MailChimp product. They use the same underlying delivery engine, the same templating and content personalization systems, and we have a heavy discount for users of both products.

Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it to email more broadly.

Re: Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp

#19

Post by ErikGelderblom »

cmorrisrsg wrote: post #2

Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

Hi Chad,

Just gave it a quick spin here and we got the SMTP relay working and tracking e-mails within 2 minutes. Very impressive. We'll play around with the API soon, it looks promising :)

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