Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by homero » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:10 AM UTC

techdragon wrote: post #72

mrmch wrote: post #50

Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost vs support. Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide. Happy to discuss discounts f…

So, realtime feedback... I opened your features page, everything looks good... I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer. Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill. I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS…

I will never use a service that isn't usage based. We're in the cloud era. A minimum monthly fee is shit.

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

#92

Post by homero » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:10 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #90

kintamanimatt wrote: post #60

As an aside from the topic at hand, this article is 3 hours old and has 52 points. Why is this hidden on the 11th page?

It set off the flamewar detector.

I haven't seen much shilling except sales agents disclosing

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

#93

Post by homero » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:11 AM UTC

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.

Possible warrant canary?

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

#94

Post by rwhitman » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

Copying my comment from another thread because I want my rage to be heard!

Seriously cannot trust a new product offering from anyone these days.

Newsletters and transactional emails are not the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a second monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally free until recently.

Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.

I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.

I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.

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

#95

Post by homero » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:14 AM UTC

laxk wrote: post #86

Does anybody need a self-hosting transactional email app with Amazon SES integration? Similar to sendy but for transactional emails.

Yeah but i'd need smtp, maybe a plugin for ssmtp?

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

#96

Post by rwhitman » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:29 AM UTC

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…

This is appalling. Transactional data and marketing data are very different.

The fact that they're willfully playing with merging customers' sensitive transaction info like financial statements, personal messages and treating it for demographic harvesting like a marketing mailing list is incredibly disturbing. Especially since that's not what we signed up for. That's not what we signed our clients and customers up for.

The ignorance and shameless nonchalance about data security that surrounds us in everyday life, in all corners or the internet and enterprise, is absolutely frightening. If you leverage a cloud vendor for anything, you're eventually putting your customers' data at risk. There's no safety net.

The tech industry can no longer self-police in this regard. I don't want regulation complicating my work any more than the next guy but I'm starting to feel there needs to be someone with authority enforcing some rules here. It's getting out of hand.

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

#97

Post by olssonm » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:36 AM UTC

Got the mail this morning (Europe) and my first thought was "WTF"? Then "How the hell do I migrate all my customers"?

I've used Mandrill for transactional mails for 4-5 years now. And always when I've had a project that requires some kind of e-mail notifications, password resets etc. I've always recommended Mandrill to my customers.

So here I am, running and handling 8+ Mandrill accounts (many customers requires exclusive access to account, have one for personal projects etc. ). A few of them in the free tier, most of them payed.

These changes will involve a whole lot of headache for me, and will sadly affect a few of my customers too.

Firstly; from around $40/month as our e-mail costs are today; to more than a total of $240/month. Not the end of the world in itself, but:

Secondly: NOT A SINGLE ONE of my customers, or me, want or have any use of MailChimp. They are two very different services with two very different purposes. Now I will have walk through with my customers on how they set up a Mailchimp account, explain to them why they have to do this and merge the account with their Mandrill one, explain to them "Oh, no – this is just a $10/month service that you don't need, or want, but have to signup to to enable those password reset emails or yours".

Oh man... Of course I will change service in most of these cases, but that's also a pain, have to get in touch with the customers IT-departments to change DNS-settings, verify senders and all that – not a great start to this day...

The whole idea is what we in Sweden call "hål i huvudet"; "Hole in the head" (as in missing a brain, not shooting someone).

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

#98

Post by jfoster » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:36 AM UTC

techdragon wrote: post #20

As a long time user... What the hell are they smoking over there. Edit... Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further. Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you. Since there is fuck all chance…

I'm not a user of it, so please excuse the question, but what is the worst part of this?

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

#99

Post by leesalminen » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:47 AM UTC

jrodom wrote: post #46

wmboy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for our clients).

We're working on adding that feature into Mailgun now. We store the content for compliance review and scheduled sends. Disclosure: I lead product development @ Mailgun.

That would an amazing feature add.

I'm currently sending 150k/mo with Mailgun and log everything for 6 months. It's rarely accessed, but invaluable when it is.

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

#100

Post by spronkey » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:47 AM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #98

techdragon wrote: post #20

As a long time user... What the hell are they smoking over there. Edit... Just read the full thing. I'm now a very fucking angry customer. They are destroying basically all of the value their product had for me. I was raging and ready to comment on their blog post, but oh look they have comments turned off, how convenient, let's ignore our customers further. Dear Mailchimp... Fuck you. Since there is fuck all chance…

I'm not a user of it, so please excuse the question, but what is the worst part of this?

Can't see any good part of it, the worst for me is probably the massive price hike. Then there's the blatant disregard for customers...