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Mandrill’s Betrayal

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Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#121

Post by ajonit »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #54

For the people debating the "If it's bulk email, why not just use Mailchimp?" question, consider the Trello use case: Someone updates a ticket and there are 4 people subscribed for notifications. In that case, it sends the same email to 4 people. According to the AUP, it's against the rules to send "emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content" Are we really going to say that someone like Trello s…

There is a fine line. As long as it's a notification email, I don't think anybody can have issues. I guess what they resent is BULK emails send through mandrill.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#122

Post by Savageman »

jrodom wrote: post #91
Strom wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mailgun spam rate of 37.5% [1] seems both awful and unusual as no other provider seems to suffer from this. Does anyone know if this data is flawed, or what's the story here? [1] As reported by https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare

We are working on this based on what we have discovered so far, there appears to be a content issue that's impacting deliverability. We have ruled out any issues with the IP address these messages are being sent from. Our lead reputation engineer going through this and we've not been successful in reaching out to the inboxtrail team yet. Disclosure: I lead product development for Mailgun.

Though you definitely still have space for improvements. I have a Mailgun account and:

1. I didn't configure my MX so you don't track delayed (asynchronous) bounces. It should be your responsibility as an email provider to use an appropriate Return-Path so spam complaints/bounces reach back to the client in this situation.

2. I opened ticket #212817 a while ago (September) about how a MITM could capture emails and replay them by injecting duplicate Subject/From/To headers (article here: https://wordtothewise.com/2014/05/dkim-injected-headers/) but this still isn't fixed today :(

That said, we're very happy with the service :), one of the killer features is how easy it is to manage wildcard sub-domains (compared to the pain it is with Mandrill).

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#124

Post by ssharp »

DanielDent wrote: post #118
ssharp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they found certain types of Mandrill users were destroying their deliverability metrics and were starting to cause issues with major email providers and their spam factors. These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability, so they have to put protecting that ahead of a lot of other things that might get them more customers.

"These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability" I think you meant deliverability . But maybe we should all switch to calling it desirability.

That may have been an autocorrect or may have been my mind not functioning correctly, but yes.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#125

Post by derefr »

mangeletti wrote: post #45

Mailchimp has a made a terrible mistake. Firstly: Before, you could get "up to 12k emails per month" for free. Now, you get 2k free sends once (for dev), and then have to pay $9.95/mo. This all sounds actually great, so far (although, I think $4.95/mo would have been a better bottom-tier plan - the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month). $9.95/mo is affordable to any startu…

> the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month

I agree, but you even understate the problem. If your API-based SaaS offers a free plan, then you can't actually enforce any caps on that plan. Anyone who uses your service can just register N free accounts and multiplex their load across them, to get as much usage out of your SaaS as they like. (Yes, even if you make them register with a credit card and deduplicate by card number; registering a bunch of Visa gift cards that don't have to maintain a balance is essentially "free.") The only real way to get around this—besides eliminating your free plan—is full-on "submit your birth certificate" KYC.

Of course, this doesn't apply if your SaaS is delivered as a web service or a fancy thick client, where the raison d'être is mostly in the UX—it's hard to multiplex that. But when your service is just an API, it's dead simple.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#126

Post by mangeletti »

derefr wrote: post #125
mangeletti wrote: post #45

Mailchimp has a made a terrible mistake. Firstly: Before, you could get "up to 12k emails per month" for free. Now, you get 2k free sends once (for dev), and then have to pay $9.95/mo. This all sounds actually great, so far (although, I think $4.95/mo would have been a better bottom-tier plan - the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month). $9.95/mo is affordable to any startu…

> the goal is to get rid of users that don't pay anything but send 12k emails per month I agree, but you even understate the problem. If your API-based SaaS offers a free plan, then you can't actually enforce any caps on that plan. Anyone who uses your service can just register N free accounts and multiplex their load across them, to get as much usage out of your SaaS as they like. (Yes, even if you make them registe…

It's not about sealing a security hole. It's about increasing the cost and decreasing the value for abusers, to reduce the amount of abuse to a sustainable level.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#127

Post by jonathanbull »

I co-run https://emailoctopus.com (an email marketing service which uses Amazon SES), and over the past few days we've seen a huge increase in signups. The fallout from this email seems large - these people aren't just moving away from Mandrill, but are also dropping MailChimp at the same time.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#128

Post by jonathanbull »

tdburn wrote: post #27

Another alternative when looking for the absolute lowest price is sendy.co. It's a self hosted solution that connects with Amazon email services. Does anyone have any experience with Sendy.co? And how it would compare with mailgun for deliverability?

If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, can I suggest you check out a project I've been working on for the last year or so?

https://emailoctopus.com

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#129

Post by MicahWedemeyer »

ajonit wrote: post #121
MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #54

For the people debating the "If it's bulk email, why not just use Mailchimp?" question, consider the Trello use case: Someone updates a ticket and there are 4 people subscribed for notifications. In that case, it sends the same email to 4 people. According to the AUP, it's against the rules to send "emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content" Are we really going to say that someone like Trello s…

There is a fine line. As long as it's a notification email, I don't think anybody can have issues. I guess what they resent is BULK emails send through mandrill.

I agree in a practical sense. I doubt Mailchimp has a problem with the case I've described.

I just think the wording of their AUP is too vague. If taken at face value, it invalidates a lot of legitimate use cases. That just means all their customers have to bend that rule a bit, and nobody knows just how far they can bend it. It's a shitty place to be as a customer.

Re: Mandrill’s Betrayal

#130

Post by BogusIKnow »

jrodom wrote: post #96
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #76

Does any other provider (Mailgun? SendGrid?) support EU standard clauses and send them on request? Mandrill does this. EU startups are out of options otherwise.

We (Mailgun) have a process to support EU model clauses that has allowed us to continue supporting most of our EU customers. There are a lot of nuances to all of this, so it's best to talk to someone on our team who has expertise and access to our legal team to come up with a plan for you. Additionally, the landscape will change on this once Privacy Shield, the successor to Safe Harbor, is enacted. It will offer stro…

Your answer is ambigious. Refering to privacy shield is of no help.

Your sales team did not answer to several inquiries last autumn so some of my clients switched from Mailgun to Mandrill last autumn.

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