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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

#11
post #6
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.

That's what I was thinking. Who hasn't moved to Mailgun already?

I just setup an account with mailgun. Pleasantly surprised at how easy it was.

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

#12
post #6
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.

That's what I was thinking. Who hasn't moved to Mailgun already?

Why not AWS SES?

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

#13
post #12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I was thinking. Who hasn't moved to Mailgun already?

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).

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

#15
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)

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

#16
There seem to be quite a few snarky comments about Mandrill here, but we've been using it for a few years and until today we've been happy with the service. I'd be interested to hear concrete reasons (apart from the current outage!) why Mandrill isn't as good as other services for a use case where I want reporting, bounce handling etc. as part of the service (e.g. not AWS SES).

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

#17

There seem to be quite a few snarky comments about Mandrill here, but we've been using it for a few years and until today we've been happy with the service. I'd be interested to hear concrete reasons (apart from the current outage!) why Mandrill isn't as good as other services for a use case where I want reporting, bounce handling etc. as part of the service (e.g. not AWS SES).

This one seems constructive, concerning, outlines events prior to today, and was posted before your post:

"Mandrill also recently got rid of their status page. A few months ago, their API has started returning nginx errors, and their status page looked like a Christmas tree; every reload would indicate different green/orange statuses. The certificate their MX servers uses is invalid (wrong domain), which prevents email delivery from compliant Danish email servers."

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

#18
post #7
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…

Sounds pretty rubbish for you and their other customers :( I'm afraid I don't have any answer for you, but I'm guessing quite a few people will be moving to sendgrid[1] - I'm not sure how I'd be able to trust a supplier after this lack of response to an outage. [1] - https://sendgrid.com/use-cases/transactional-email/

Recently moved our company from Mandrill to SendGrid - mainly because we were having deliverability issues with Mandrill.

We're definitely a lot happier from that perspective (and obviously given this issue I'm glad we moved), and overall it's really good. A couple of things to be aware of:

- Unlike Mandrill you can't send with a test API key and then view the emails. We end up sending real emails to a test inbox, which has some pros and cons - but cons include it costing email sends, and Gmail being awkward and silently de-duping sometimes.

- You also can't view sent email content, at all (beyond the subject). Mandrill you can, Sendgrid don't seem to save it.

- Mandrill/others probably has the same issue, but SendGrid without your own IP sends emails to new recipients extremely slowly. And they lock your whole account while they're doing it, password resets won't send to existing recipients and nor will test emails to your test inbox.

- You also only get 3 days of email send history, you can pay for up to 30 I think. I'm not sure what the rule was with Mandrill but they seemed to keep a lot more available, though their search would time out most of the time so I'm not sure how much was really there and accessible.

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

#19
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…

Not that it's a great alternative, but SendGrid uses Handlebars templates so it's pretty easy to render it yourself using any Handlebars library. You could probably quite easily write an AWS Lambda or similar that fetches a template using their API, populates it with data you post and returns the HTML.

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

#20
post #17

There seem to be quite a few snarky comments about Mandrill here, but we've been using it for a few years and until today we've been happy with the service. I'd be interested to hear concrete reasons (apart from the current outage!) why Mandrill isn't as good as other services for a use case where I want reporting, bounce handling etc. as part of the service (e.g. not AWS SES).

This one seems constructive, concerning, outlines events prior to today, and was posted before your post: "Mandrill also recently got rid of their status page. A few months ago, their API has started returning nginx errors, and their status page looked like a Christmas tree; every reload would indicate different green/orange statuses. The certificate their MX servers uses is invalid (wrong domain), which prevents ema…

That's true. None of those affect the way I use Mandrill, which is perhaps why I didn't pay too much attention to it, but it doesn't paint a good picture for sure.
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