
Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp - po
http://mandrill.com/
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cmorrisrsg
Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any
questions you guys might have.

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brittohalloran
So how does this compare to something like SendGrid? More or less a direct
competitor? I noticed you can only send mail via the API (no SMTP relay). Any
other notable differences?

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cmorrisrsg
We're trying to make Mandrill a stable email platform for all uses, so in that
way we're similar to SendGrid. Where we're really trying to focus isn't so
much in just the delivery of the email, though we do have a ton of experience
doing that well.

Mandrill is a product that is trying to make your application-driven emails as
easily tracked, tested, and understood as the bulk email you'd send using
MailChimp. It's still early days for the product and we're still iterating
rapidly, but that's where we're trying to get.

We're also integrated with MailChimp itself. We've got a big discount for paid
MailChimp users that want to use Mandrill, and you can share templates between
Mandrill and MailChimp easily. We'll be integrating more deeply in the future
- really trying to make a one-stop shop for email-related needs for
businesses.

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ericingram
I think deep integration with MailChimp is a huge reason to use Mandrill. I'm
not and have never been a paid MailChimp customer, but this might get me
there.

I currently use MailGun for transactional e-mail, and CampaignMonitor for
marketing e-mail. MailGun's UI is really rough, so Mandrill is pulling me in
for that reason alone, and CampaignMonitor pretty great but I haven't use it
lately any way.

Have you considered discounts for developers deploying individual accounts for
clients?

~~~
cmorrisrsg
We've considered it, but we're still working on our reseller/integrator story.

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DanielKehoe
After looking at ten other transactional email service providers, I picked
Mandrill for the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app built for the RailsApps
project. The benefits are the generous free plan, the easy integration with
Rails, and the integration with MailChimp. So far, so good, though a few users
were confused when they tried to use the same API keys for MailChimp and
Mandrill. If you want to see how to set up Rails with Mandrill (and
MailChimp), see the Rails Prelaunch Signup example app:
<http://railsapps.github.com/rails-prelaunch-signup/>.

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ceejayoz
Am I the only one unable to get the page to load at all?

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ark15
Probably. An obligatory reference to downornot -
<http://www.downornot.com/mandrill>

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agotterer
Anyone know what they are using to generate their docs?

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agotterer
They wrote back to my inquiry. It's totally custom, not easy to release open
source and doesn't seem like they intend to.

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zbailey
Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail
services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special
sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al).

If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main
things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other
providers?

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cmorrisrsg
There are a few things that we think set Mandrill apart from the pack. Our
application is designed with responsiveness in mind, and we have mobile
application on both of the major platforms so you can get access to your email
stats and reputation wherever you are. We have search and analytics deeply
ingrained in the application in a way that is fairly unique - letting you see
your emails in context and trying to derive the context for you when we can.
We also integrate deeply with the main MailChimp product. They use the same
underlying delivery engine, the same templating and content personalization
systems, and we have a heavy discount for users of both products.

Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take
the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it
to email more broadly.

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grease
Does the Mandrill inbound email system parse out quoted text?

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cmorrisrsg
Not yet. The inbound system right now is really basic - we'll parse out the
messages and deliver them to a webhook, but we won't munge it much beyond
breaking apart attachments and things.

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stephenhuey
So the pricing is flat rate? No difference for inbound emails?

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cmorrisrsg
Yes - the pricing is flat rate. Right now charging for inbound emails is
turned off since the feature is so new and basic, but inbound emails will be
indexed and tracked the same as outbound emails, so they'll be charged the
same.

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vailripper
Looks great. Currently in the process of building a new application using
Postmark, will certainly evaluate a switch. The pricing certainly blows
Postmark out of the water.

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bittersweet
Are you guys using anything in particular to power the webhooks?

I'll be integrating webhooks in my own app soon so I'm quite interested how
others have 'solved' that so to speak.

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cmorrisrsg
We built on top of our own internal job scheduling systems that we use for
email to handle retries, batching, and concurrency handling so we don't
overwhelm your servers. It's all custom stuff, though.

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klbarry
Mandrills honestly scare the hell out of me - they are vicious animals. I'm
sure most people don't have that association though...

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cmorrisrsg
That's one of the reasons we chose that name for the brand. Since Mandrill is
an infrastructure service, we wanted it to feel more serious and aggressive
than MailChimp.

