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Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

blog.mandrill.com

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Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#111

Post by eugenoprea »

I've been reading conversations here on Hacker News and noticed that this has created a lot of frustration among existing Mandrill users, especially for those that have setup the system for their customers.

I believe that MailChimp was aware of this before making this decision and knew that they are going to loose some customers. At this point they will become a bit expensive, even more expensive than SendGrid and a lot of their customer base will migrate away.

However, I do believe that this is something they wanted with this move, so that people using the service for free which took advantage and sent spam and also small businesses that cannot afford to pay a high end service will move away.

Then, they will keep the MailChimp fans, those that afford the service and will spend more on the service.

In conclusion, it's a bold strategy change that will weed out some of the bad accounts and will ultimately improve the revenue stream for MailChimp.

What is really sad is the fact that they are going to also lose a lot of their genuine customers who do not want or need MailChimp.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#112

Post by losvedir »

I have a proposal. I'll give all the transactional email competitors (mailgun, postmark, sparkpost, etc) a week to get their shit together and come up with a migration proposal for all of us moving away from Mandrill. I'm sure they're scrambling around trying to figure out how to take advantage of this ridiculous situation, and I bet a bunch of them are on HN. So how about this:

1. Any HN user trying to figure out what to do next, leave me your email on this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16wrzK3srobnRKXzbhpsftCvmhgf...

2. Any transactional email provider, write a blog post or something with how to migrate to your platform. Include differences vs. Mandrill with regard to pricing, API, DNS, etc and anything else you can think of to ease our transition - maybe promise of an upcoming Mandrill template importer, coupon to price-match, etc. Email me the link (contact info in HN profile)

3. In one week (Thursday, March 3, 1200 UTC), I'll email everyone in (1) the responses I get from (2)

I promise not to spam people who leave their email address and will only ever send just the single email next week, and then delete the Google Form and its responses. Check my HN history, I'm just a developer trying to figure out what to do now. My hope is that enough hot leads in one place will be incentive enough for the various competitors to spend a bit of time writing a detailed migration plan (which would help me!), and they probably can't make a good one while this thread is still on the front page.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#113

Post by ilamparithi »

lttlrck wrote: post #34

Oh great. Now we'll have to go and touch a system that has been working flawlessly for years. That'll end well won't it? So as a big thank you I'll migrate it to another provider while I'm there. There is something off in the tone of the announcement.

Definitely. I noticed the tone too. Somewhat brash and arrogant.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#114

Post by manidoraisamy »

spronkey wrote: post #87
manidoraisamy wrote: post #74

There is something more serious than migration and price increase. By migrating to mailchimp you are agreeing to mailchimp's terms and service. If I understand it correctly, now they can read all your customers' email address and content (presumably for machine learning & send optimization). This is in direct conflict with the agreement we signed with our customers on data sharing. Unless I am mistaken, this seems to…

Can confirm. Privacy policy Item 5.1 - Previous: http://web.archive.org/web/20160209234946/http://mandrill.co... vs new: http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ Item 5.1 Changes from: 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. to That information may include your a…

"your Subscribers' email address, credit card information, purchase history" - These are super sensitive! It takes more than 3 months of legal process and convincing to get our customers to share these under strict data privacy clause. And here comes mailchimp and want to sniff it under the hood in the name of migration. They will literally land us in jail, if we don't migrate.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#115

Post by adnans »

mrmch wrote: post #47
adnans wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to have more than 300 templates per account? We're offering custom transactional email templates to our clients and might exceed this limit. Definitely looking at moving to SendGrid after this announcement. Previewing content of the last 7 days of sent emails would also be a bonus.

Check us out (Sendwithus.com, yc w14) Unlimited templates, and you can swap out backends (SendGrid, SparkPost, others)

Thanks, but your pricing model is all wrong when it comes to transactional emails. We're looking for something which is more usage based instead of based on number of subscribers. Nice templating though.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#117

Post by saevarom »

okholy wrote: post #109

my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your suggestions and why?

My experience with SendGrid is not very good. Slow delivery, random halts on e-mails due to low activity on account, which I was not notified about, the list goes on. They did update their UI recently which was a good step, but the other issues remain.

I'm thinking about trying SES.

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#118

Post by manidoraisamy »

eugenoprea wrote: post #111

I've been reading conversations here on Hacker News and noticed that this has created a lot of frustration among existing Mandrill users, especially for those that have setup the system for their customers. I believe that MailChimp was aware of this before making this decision and knew that they are going to loose some customers. At this point they will become a bit expensive, even more expensive than SendGrid and a…

I don't think it's as simple as that. This is a data mining exercise - to read our customer's subscribers data and to move from a "dumb pipe" to a "personalization engine". From mailchimp CEO's blog: "We came to a fork in the road, and choosing the “personalized transactional” path with Mandrill suits us and our customers better than the “utility” path."

http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

Re: Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

#119

Post by nathanelward »

IgorPartola wrote: post #4

Time to fire up HN search for that product where you host your own Mandrill clone that relies on SES on the backend and is like 5 times cheaper. Anyone remember what it was? Hmm: I guess I was thinking of https://sendy.co which is a replacement for MailChimp and not Mandrill.

Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to this service, having previously used Sendy.

Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES, which include SendGrid, Sparkpost, Leadersend, Elasticemail and MailGun. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel communication will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.

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