
Mandrill pauses email sending without prior notification - kehers
This is the second time I am experiencing this with Mandrill. Email sending was paused without notifying the account email. In both instance (2 different sites&#x2F;accounts), it took hours to notice users are not receiving emails and even when we did, we were checking the wrong source for the problem.
This is really unprofessional. If for any reason email sending should be paused, I think the email on file should at least be notified. Some time critical messages are being sent via those emails.
Anyone experienced this too?
======
davismwfl
We send out quite a bit of email via mandrill (as well as SES) and haven't
ever experienced this. They should alert you no matter and I am surprised they
didn't.

As for mandrill what is your deliverability rate and reputation? We generally
maintain just shy of 98% deliverability and an "excellent" reputation on their
dashboard. We also follow all the rules for canSPAM even on transactional
emails where technically you could get away without some of it. We developed
an automated list cleansing system to make sure we keep hard bounces from
getting resent, fixes common typos in domains, only retry soft bounces twice
for the same campaign etc. The list cleansing helped us go from 95%
deliverability and a "Good" reputation up to the 97.5+ and "excellent", which
for us helps our clients. Also, another point, you can use sub-accounts to
manage higher risk campaigns etc which can help prevent some of the headaches.

Not that this solves mandrill not notifying you, but out of curiosity, do you
have webhooks setup? We extensively use webhooks to tell us what is happening
and while they don't directly tell you sending has been paused (that I know
of), the status of the emails in the webhooks would tell you something is
wrong. I know for our platform we have a small component we wrote that
monitors when email is being sent and expects to see the statuses updated
fairly quickly, if it doesn't we get alerted, or if certain percentages of
emails start coming back with "bad" statuses as we defined them we get an
alert. I would think if you are sending enough email and using any third party
email gateway you would want the same thing.

------
codegeek
I am an overall happy customer of Mandrill. But they have a reputation system
which sets a hourly quota. If your reputation gets hurt, your hourly quota
could go down significantly. I had a client who once got tagged as a spammer
and that brought down the hourly emails quota to literally 2 digits and it was
in thousands before. But mandrill is very good at improving the reputation as
well if you use it correctly. Also, they do send you emails everytime your
hourly quota is adjusted. So that is your signal to check and ensure that
emails can still be sent.

------
cyberpanther
Haven't used Mandrill but in the past used the parent MailChimp a lot. While
the service was great most of the time, when we ran into issues, MailChimp
support sucked. It was hard to get issues resolved and often times they would
not resolve the right issues in the first place.

In my opinion, if you have a high amount of email transactions, I would not
use MailChimp or Mandrill because they don't back up their service with a good
enterprise level support.

~~~
davismwfl
Who do you use now? I haven't experienced any support issues with Mandrill
yet, although I have heard others say they are slow to respond and aren't
always very helpful.

