Ah, free for up to 12k emails, or something close - looking at this now. Thanks for the tip. One thing I have noticed is their terms preclude the sending of material under Fair Use terms of copyright law ... but I'm assuming that is a mistake.
>"You represent and warrant that you either own or have permission to use all of the material in your Emails." //
Fair use isn't permission, nor ownership, it is statutory right of use though.
They bring in Spamhaus' definition of spam too, which on first reading appears to be self-contradictory - requiring each message sent to be explicitly requested. Taken by the letter this would mean I couldn't, for example, send out a message to a group of customers with whom I had a standing relationship to let them know of a change to terms & conditions, for example, without explicit consent. That means anticipating every email. Catchall phrases like "agree to receive all email" wouldn't work as the customer "has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent".
Indeed "still-revocable" permission means that as soon as a mass email is sent it becomes spam regardless, it's no longer revocable. There are other problems too - verifiable opt in means an alternate system needs to be used for the verification emails.
In turn that means that any email I send to multiple recipients puts me in breech of Mandrill's T&Cs.
Mandrill have a circular reference from the Terms "You retain ownership of the materials you upload to the Service. We may use or disclose your materials only as we describe in these Terms and our Privacy Policy." and in the Privacy Policy:
>"Information You Provide to Us: When you register to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, credit card information, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy."
In short the policies allow them to harvest data from emails sent with the service and to use it as they wish. They go as far as to intimate that because they do use the message data internally that the service is not for personal email. There's also a clause Terms 5.f that allows doxing and combining the info with your account data.
The "protections" for selling of your info with the business don't work as there are standard "we can alter this agreement unilaterally" conditions.
tl;dr law - it's complicated. This service is absolutely not for "personal" emails however.
