
Mandrill’s Betrayal - jjude
http://www.dangrossman.info/2016/02/28/mandrills-betrayal/
======
jqueryin
Big win for Mailgun, huge loss for MailChimp. They just stabbed developers in
the back.

Take note kids: this is a shining example of how not to market such a large
product/service change.

What a fiasco. Directly going against their About Page, failing to update
their pricing page to indicate the change.. it's all bad.

I'm in the camp of everyone else where the TOS change is forcing my startup
leave.

The net negative effect is that I'll likely start moving off of MailChimp for
marketing emails as well. They've already broken my trust.

Their pricing model is a sham anyways: paying for list maintenance is utter
BS. It's a small multi-kilobyte file if you're not actually using it.

I've taken to exporting and clearing certain lists at intervals to keep costs
down. In reality, I should simply never have done user data collection with
MailChimp to begin with.

~~~
gk1
I imagine there was some kind of crisis happening behind-the-scenes... That's
the only explanation I see for the overnight policy change and lagging updates
on the site. Either that or total incompetence.

Interestingly, their (former) competitors are taking full advantage of the
outrage by running ads on Twitter and LinkedIn aimed at Mandrill customers
who've been screwed.

~~~
ssharp
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.

~~~
DanielDent
"These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability"

I think you meant _deliverability_. But maybe we should all switch to calling
it desirability.

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

------
scosman
It's way worse than just the TOS change. Mandrill has a lot of advanced
features (webhooks, reporting, AB testing, templates, etc). Some companies may
be able to switch to SES or mailgun in a day, but more advanced integrations
could take weeks. We're stuck with either pulling people off critical project
in order to meet their ridiculously short deadline, or pay insane bills (the
new price is over 4x the price we signed up for).

I emailed their founders and never received a reply.

Lesson learned: do not take a dependancy on MailChimp for any reason.

~~~
x5n1
Other mail services can do the same. It's funny we have not fixed the problem
of free mail, i.e. any one should be able to run a mail server anywhere and
expect delivery of their mail. We should just do a better job of filtering
spam and bad users, but mail should still be able to leave any server and be
delivered to any other address.

~~~
scosman
Just to be clear: I'm happy paying a premium for all the great features
services like SendGrid/Mandrill offer. We knew about cheaper services like
SES, or the ability to roll our own, but we didn't want to re-invent the
wheel.

I'm not happy about them quadrupling their prices, with a ridiculously short
deadline to avoid it.

~~~
hayd
The real kicker: will Mailchimp drop support completely later on... next
month? I've no confidence in them anymore. We're moving asap.

------
etjossem
Some head-to-head comparisons of Mailgun and SendGrid, for those trying to
find an alternative provider.

\- _Free Tier_ : Up to 10k emails/mo with Mailgun, up to 12k with SendGrid.

\- _Low Volume_ : To send 100,000 emails/mo on a shared IP, you'll pay $45
with Mailgun or $20 with SendGrid.

\- _High Volume_ : To send 300,000 emails/mo on a dedicated IP, you'll pay
$204 with Mailgun or $199 with SendGrid.

\- _Deliverability_ : In today's InboxTrail comparison, Mailgun shows 62.5%
inboxing, SendGrid shows 97.5%. [1]

If you need any help with your integration, I'd be happy to put you in touch
with the right people on our team. My email's in my profile.

Disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

[1] [https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

~~~
Strom
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](https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare)

~~~
jrodom
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.

~~~
Savageman
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/](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).

~~~
jrodom
On issue #1, we're going to update the language around this in our control
panel and put together better documentation. In reality, having MX records are
important to allow for sender address verification [1], which many SMTP
servers require.

On issue #2, Thanks and apologies for the slow response, This ticket slipped
under our radar.

To give you a quick answer: we'll look into the approach you described in your
blog post as well as RFC 6376. It seems legit but we'll need to do some more
testing to ensure that deliverability does not suffer due to changing how we
sign messages. If deliverability does suffer, we can always make this
something that is an optional security setting that can be toggled, like how
you can enable and disable TLS certificate validation now.

Our security engineer will take a look and reach out to you with more details
in the ticket.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_verification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_verification)

~~~
Savageman
Thank you for replying. Glad you guys are considering this :)

------
mangeletti
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
startup, and it's sustainable (vs paying accounts having to cover the cost for
the hundreds of thousands of users sending millions of emails for free).

The mistake they made was in doing _anything_ else besides this. If they had
simply changed the pricing like this, but left everything else alone, they
would double their profit in 5 minutes while only pissing off the customers
that aren't ever going to pay anyway.

Instead, they did what they did, and now they're no better than TWTR.

~~~
asg
Couldn't agree more. I was sending a couple of thousand emails a month with
mandrill for free. Would have happily paid 9.95 a month. But when I got their
email, and read their blogpost, it was completely unclear what I had to pay.
The message I got from them was, "sorry, don't want your business."

With this, and Kimono, in one week, I am moving to amamzon ses, though it has
very few reporting features. Sorry Sendgrid/Mailgun, but TWICE burnt, and all
that...

~~~
troels
Sendgrid has been in the game for a long time and has it as their core
business (unlike mandrill). So I wouldn't be too afraid of them closing down
overnight.

------
MicahWedemeyer
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 should be using Mailchimp
for that?

~~~
ajonit
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.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
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.

------
paulbennett
> They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with
> immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s
> raison d’être: sending bulk mail programmatically.

I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e. not
bulk emails. In fact bulk emails are specifically what Mailchimp is designed
for. Sounds like people were using Mandrill in an attempt to get around some
of Mailchimp's pricing structure, and now that has come to an end.

That said, I will agree that the change has come rather abruptly.

~~~
ceejayoz
> I thought the idea behind Mandrill was to send transactional emails, i.e.
> not bulk emails.

[https://www.mandrill.com/about/](https://www.mandrill.com/about/)

"Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and
welcome messages, _as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters_."

So, their About page is currently explicitly condoning violating their own
Terms of Service.

~~~
zwerdlds
Not sure if that's really true. Non-bulk marketing and newsletter emails are a
thing.

~~~
ceejayoz
[https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206251597-Wha...](https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206251597-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill-)

> What types of email can I send with Mandrill?

> But you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too.

~~~
zwerdlds
Additionally, > View our Terms of Use for extra details.

It seems like this change is to avoid being on the hook for those non-{legal,
non-spam} emails.

------
Benjamin_Dobell
What pissed me off the most about this change is that Mandrill was
specifically marketed as a separate product, something they believed in. We
had no reason to suspect MailChimp didn't actually care for the market they
were operating in.

Now MailChimp have come out and said something along the lines of "Sure, it
made us lots of money. But we never really cared about you or your use case.
So we're killing the product."

It is for this reason I have lost respect for MailChimp. Quite frankly, they
can't be trusted.

------
adenner
As a replacement consider mailgun
([http://www.mailgun.com](http://www.mailgun.com)). I have used their free
tier before when I had to send mail for a side project.

~~~
mangeletti
\+ 1

We use Mailgun at work, and I can attest to its consistency and performance in
inbound mail processing. Our webhook is consistently hit within about 1 second
when I send a test email to our app's email.

I will say that Mailgun's UI could use a little bit of help. There are a
number of things that make it feel half baked, but in terms of functionality,
as aforementioned, it's not lacking.

We were, hitherto, considering the possibility of using Mandrill for outbound
mail, only because they seemed to offer more spam folder avoidance knowledge
and analytical data, while Mailgun was (and is) surely preferable for
inbound... that switch will never happen now.

~~~
jrodom
Great feedback. Our UI is definitely something that could use some attention
and is a big priority for us this year. We've made some big hires that are
100% focused on making it a great experience.

If you'd like to talk about more specifics, please reach out at anytime josh
[at] mailgun [dot] com.

------
ne01
It's interesting, 5 months ago we made the switch to Mailgun because we were
afraid of this day.

Basically, MailChimp didn't like Mandrill sending mass emails from the
beginning. As far as I remember (5 months ago) Mandrill only allowed you to
send emails one by one but Mailgun lets you send 1K emails at once.

That, plus the fact that they changed their policy for verifying domains with
no notice which affected many users (not us).

[http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain-
verification-m...](http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain-verification-
mandatory.html)

"This is a breaking change for us, we didn't have any notice at all?! Very
poor customer service!" \-- Adam Curtis (Mandrill user, 7 months ago)

Lucky for us we made the switch many months ago!

FYI, I'm sad to see that MailChimp (as a company) cannot see how two divisions
in the same company can compete. Like Amazon hosting Netflix and also
competing with Netflix. IMO, Amazon management is smart enough to keep these
two divisions separate enough so either one that'll do a better job will
succeed.

------
marcusr
We were using Mandrill's email to HTTP feature for delivering inbound emails
into our web services. The cutover period for needing to be a paying Mailchimp
is April 27th, so we had two months to convert. Luckily it took less than a
day to build and test the same functionality using Amazon SES, so we've
already converted away. To be fair, it was functionality we were using
completely for free, so I expected it to happen sooner rather than later.

------
alexgaribay
I was going to use Mandrill/Mailchimp until this fiasco. I discovered
SendGrid, which has quite a lot of great features. Their free tier is pretty
generous with 12k emails a month. I recommend them to people looking for an
alternative to Mandrill.

------
20years
Mailgun & SendGrid are good solutions. This is a script that may help you
migrate over quickly and uses both API's so you are not locked into just one
[https://github.com/gosmartsolutions/mandrill-
alternative](https://github.com/gosmartsolutions/mandrill-alternative)

------
woodcut
In a previous job we tried to mimic Mediums "email only - no password" login
infrastructure using mandrill. Whereby a user clicks 'login', a session token
is generated and a link sent in an email, the user clicks it and is then
logged in - no password needed. sounds great...

It turned out that in production, even after all the hoops that were there to
be jumped the bounce rate was around 5% and some of the messages that did get
through took around ~15 mins to turn up in the users inbox.

I don't think much of this is Mandrills fault but up to that point i had
little inkling of how bad email is for communicating en mass.

~~~
vram22
Email is not supposed to be necessarily near real time, I think (not an expert
though). Not sure of the details at the protocol level, but my guess is that
it may work differently from HTTP, due to being older, and invented in the
time of UUCP, IBM email, etc., some of which involved store-and-forward
techniques, mail queue files, etc. (I've used UUCP email back in the day, at
one company I worked at. We used to have to dial up the other city's modem and
then go through a slightly arcane dance of Unix commands to send the email on
its way, or receive email from other branch offices. Fun times ... When it
first became available, I remember using it a good amount to download tech
articles from various sites via Internet-over-email methods, such as ftp to
rtfm.mit.edu via email :) There was even a chapter about that in a Dummies
book. And there's an Internet FAQ about it at faqs.org, or there was.

------
losvedir
Ah, might be worth pointing out my earlier proposal[0] in the HN discussion
when the Mandrill announcement happened. I was surprised by the response I
got, with >300 people leaving their email address. A number of providers
emailed me as well, so I'm still planning to send out whatever I get to
everyone on Thursday.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173325)

------
agopaul
Everybody talk about Mailgun, but there are other valuable alternatives:
Sendgrid, AWS SES, Postmark.

At Redokun we use Postmark. It proved to have a good deliverability and the UI
is very good.

~~~
sre_ops
Postmark is super unreliable for large volume - their servers are down
periodically and their email is periodically delayed for hours.

It still does not support multiple admin roles per account.

~~~
agopaul
I've never used them for large volume actually. Are you using them via SMTP or
API? I'm asking because I've never seen a single API call fail with them, but
maybe it's about the volume like you said.

For large volume sending, I'd probably use AWS SES. In the past, I've used it
for sending 150-200K/transactional emails per day and the service was very
robust.

On the other hand, I've seen Mandrill increase the number of failed API calls
with a lower sending volume.

------
LyndsySimon
This has impacted our platform as well. While the Mandrill API is still
operational at the moment, the immediate change in TOS means that we were
technically in violation of the terms before we were even notified that there
was a change.

> You can no longer use it to send mail on behalf of your users, as in a
> contact form processor or white labeled service.

------
waffle_ss
I switched my MVP to AWS SES yesterday after having used Mandrill for
transactional emails for about a year. I _almost_ decided to just pay the
$20/mo for a MailChimp plan because of SES's documentation and setup
complexity and the annoyance of the sandbox (you can only send mail to and
from pre-verified email addresses while in the sandbox).

However, I filed the support ticket to get out of the sandbox, requesting 2.5K
daily emails. They approved it several hours later with 50K daily emails (!),
so they are quite generous there - I was worried I'd have to keep an eye on
the number of emails I'm sending, but the amount they gave me gives a nice
buffer.

edit: Just to add, I'm one of those people that would religiously open spam
emails and look for the relay, and if they're reputable like Mandrill or
SendGrid, I'd go to their abuse page and report the email by pasting the email
headers. Extrapolating from how many spam mailing lists I got added onto by
recruiters, I can see how MailChimp employees' time could get sucked up
investigating a lot of these spammers who probably slummed off the free or low
cost tiers, and could damage their bounce rates.

So I can't totally blame them for this move w.r.t. Mandrill, and I still plan
on using MailChimp when I have a need to send marketing emails to my users.

~~~
tdaltonc
Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from
most spam filters?

~~~
ceejayoz
EC2's IP range is scorched earth, yes.

SES is in a separate set of IP ranges, and their feedback loops with major
ISPs lets Amazon manage their reputation much more closely.

~~~
aquark
True, but we switched from SES to Mandrill because of delivery problems from
SES.

Mandrill was way better, but now it looks like we need to move again. (And our
complaint % on Mandrill was somewhere around 0.01%)

------
jessaustin
This indignation seems a bit oversold. Part of that is quoting the bulk
prohibition on Mandrill without quoting the explanation that immediately
follows:

 _Mandrill is designed for transactional email. Please use MailChimp for your
bulk sending needs._

Anyone who was using Mandrill for bulk mailing will now need to use MailChimp,
which should have been the case anyway. Maybe someone misunderstood the
different purposes of the two services, but misunderstanding happens, and it's
a two-way street.

~~~
ceejayoz
Part of the indignation is that Mandrill's About page still says:

> Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and
> welcome messages, _as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters._

[http://mandrill.com/about/](http://mandrill.com/about/)

and:

> you can send any legal, non-spam email through Mandrill, too

[https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206251597-Wha...](https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206251597-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill-)

------
codegeek
Wow good to know I am not the only one upset at this. This will be big for the
bootstrapped business I run. Have a lot of clients on mandrill and need to
move them away slowly. This is going to be a long process with multiple
clients. Thank you Mandrill!! /s

------
jdstafford
I feel like SparkPost should get a mention here:
[https://www.sparkpost.com](https://www.sparkpost.com)

edit (more details): The free tier allows up to 100,000 emails

~~~
richleland
Thanks for the mention jdstafford - I'm on the application development team at
SparkPost - we'd love to have you give our service a try. We've got a Slack
community up at [http://slack.sparkpost.com](http://slack.sparkpost.com) \-
feel free to jump in and say hi!

~~~
jdstafford
No doubt. You all support CharmCityJS which is awesome. I was actually using
mandrill for a side project and will be switching to sparkpost. Thanks for the
reply.

~~~
netynx
I'd stay away - far away - from sparkpost. We've been a volume user with
sendgrid for years and recently started a test with sparkpost (well before the
Mandrill thing), thinking it would be a good backup solution over our inhouse
alternative. Suddenly this weekend, we're getting 403 rejections thru the
sparkpost API. We were thinking it was an issue on our side and spent some
time verifying it wasn't us. When we asked Sparkpost customer support to look
into it, they eventually came back saying our Sparkpost account was suspended
by their compliance team -- this with no indication or warning (and with us
sending very low volume to known-good users in this test). fyi, our sendgrid
reputation score is >98 and blacklist-free. We know how to maintain a good
sender rep. Sparkpost CSE says their Compliance team is overwhelmed and maybe
we'll hear back in a couple of days. Are you kidding me? We had high hopes for
Sparkpost until this. Now, I can't see how we can possibly trust them, which
is ironic to say the least.

------
MrBlue
They must be popping bottles in the Mailgun offices today. :)

------
Exuma
I hated this change, and switched to Mailgun immediately. I never liked
mailchimp at all, and this sealed the deal.

------
Disruptive_Dave
Quick comical irony break: the heads-up email Mandrill sent us about this went
to our spam folder.

------
w4
I just noticed this when I logged in to check on a Mandrill template this
morning. Couldn't believe it is an immediate TOS change without any sort of
grandfathering or timeline for existing customers - that's a terrible way to
handle things, never mind the rapid shutdown.

Doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me as a Mailchimp user. I'll be looking
at alternatives for both transactional email and newsletters ASAP.

------
jonathanbull
I co-run [https://emailoctopus.com](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.

~~~
spronkey
I really hope their customers completely abandon them. We have - switched to
Sendy and SES for newsletters, and investigating what to do with our
transactional emails.

This sort of behaviour should be absolutely frowned upon, in any industry.

------
johng
I've had a Mandrill account for about 3 years, and a Mailchimp account for
about 4. I just cancelled my Mailchimp account and listed the reason as how
poorly they handled this situation and how they screwed a customer over. I
can't in good conscience support a company that could do this. I'll take my
business elsewhere.

------
sideproject
Was very disappointed with Mandrill as I've been using them reliably for the
last couple of years.

I did a bit of research as soon as the news was announced. And found Sendgrid
the most on par with what Mandrill was offering.

It seems a tad slow, but it's ok. Someone mentioned SparkPost, but quite a few
emails from them were going to SPAM folders.

~~~
richleland
I work on SparkPost's app dev team - I know you've decided on another route
but would love to understand what you were seeing. If you'd be willing to
share details with developers@sparkpost.com or on
[http://slack.sparkpost.com](http://slack.sparkpost.com) we'd really
appreciate it.

Additionally, we have an awesome deliverability team over here and we work
very closely with our users to diagnose and resolve problems like this
efficiently. They'd be happy to chat with you about inbox placement should you
decide to re-investigate :)

------
atemerev
I second for Mailgun. Works perfectly well.

~~~
brightball
Very underrated service. The level of control that their inbound email system
allows is impressive.

------
dylanz
I feel bad for the people forced to switch due to various reasons. The Mailgun
guys were always extremely helpful when we used them and often went way above
and beyond in helping us debug mail issues. Also, their webhook API is great
when you need to accept large attachments.

------
tdburn
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?

~~~
wnscooke
It has been great for me. Set it up on a DO droplet, somehow worked my through
the Amazon setup and voila, my own sendy instance! It's tracking is excellent.
And the guy behind it responds quite promptly to any issues. I'd say go for
it.

~~~
tdburn
Thanks for the feedback! How many emails are you sending out a month? And do
you do any newsletters?

------
sarreph
What a mess and no way to treat the 'power' users who value you most (i.e.
developers).

I've always found MailChimp's editor to be a complete and utter nightmare to
use, for formatting — it's so buggy — not to mention random shut-downs of
other sub-services (such as the advanced editor).

They really need to sort out their developer evangelism.

------
misiti3780
Can someone explain to me why they would do this ? I cannot think of a reason
why they would stop providing this service.

~~~
tdaltonc
They've making an 80/20 decision. Make the service better for the 20% of users
that produce 80% of your revenue and price everyone else out. They don't want
to be the startup economies dumb email tube. They want to be a high margin
service for companies with more marketers or designers than programers.

~~~
spronkey
Indeed. But instead of gracefully transitioning like a sensible company would
- i.e. slowly phasing the two together, teeing up alternatives for customers,
giving plenty of advanced notice and warning etc, they've gone full nuclear.

Part of me hopes they go bankrupt.

------
apitts
@bwest from SendGrid is working on an API to API migration script and I
believe is looking for some more users to test it out. See Tweet here:
[https://twitter.com/bwest/status/704704023589289984](https://twitter.com/bwest/status/704704023589289984)

------
_Codemonkeyism
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.

~~~
jrodom
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 stronger protections and
guarantees to EU customers without the need to have model clauses signed
between entities.

Our sales team sales [at] mailgun [dot] com can talk to you about your
specific situation.

~~~
BogusIKnow
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.

~~~
jrodom
I'm not sure why there was a disconnect with our sales team, but I'm happy to
help. Could you e-mail me with more details? josh [at] mailgun [dot] com

The model clause process is not trivial and often requires work between the
legal teams from Mailgun and the respective EU company. We've gone through the
process and can definitely help any of our existing or prospective customers
get through it, though. Every business is a little different, so we'd need to
talk through the specifics.

------
rloc
Interesting that my mandrill dashboard shows I can send 62000 emails
"absolutely free". I'm on the free tier.

------
tbrooks
I want to use AWS SES, but the lack of a dashboard (like Mandrill had) is a
dealbreaker.

Quick strawpoll: are others in that boat too?

~~~
jimmypesto
Amazon is the safest bet for me given their resources and reputation. For my
uses I can live with their rudimentary dashboard for now knowing they'll
likely improve it over time. My service sends about 1500 emails a day.

------
akurilin
Bummer. We were huge users of Mandrill. Never loved the UI, but it got the job
done.

Now, Sendgrid vs Mailgun?

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55555
What a strange decision. They are murdering an amazingly successful business.

------
rrggrr
Goodbye Mailchimp. $500 per month soon to be spent elsewhere.

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tehwebguy
Did they promise never to do this or something?

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isachintiwari
Pepipost - Free SMTP alternative to Mandrill

[http://www.pepipost.com/](http://www.pepipost.com/)

\- Free plan and send up to 25,000 emails each month. Free forever. \- No
credit card required. \- DKIM is not required (Domain Verification: (a.) Meta
Tag Validation, (b.) File Creation - System can verify the domain based on the
presence of a file in the root directory of the domain.). \- Pay only for
emails that are not opened by your customers.

* 3 Months Free Unlimited Transactional Emails + 25k emails per month free forever. * Use the below code while signup with Pepipost.

Code: MANDRILL-TO-PEPI

Great! This is probably the best FREE alternative for Mandrill.

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd want to see deliverability numbers, and "free forever" is probably what
got Mandrill into this situation. They had to roll back that promise. No
credit card required means spammers just register a new account for every 25k
emails they want to send.

I'd rather pay for something sustainable.

~~~
isachintiwari
Hello, Pepipost build on a very clear philosophy to encourage good senders and
fight against SPAM, hence Pepis follow a strict on-boarding and delivery
processes for both Paid and Free customers. This helped in achieving 100%
deliverability with highest Inbox placement rate for all good senders.

~~~
ceejayoz
[citation needed]

No one gets 100% deliverability, and highest inbox rate for all senders
requires serious proof.

~~~
isachintiwari
We have 100% deliverability with clients who sends emails on double optin
database. You are right for other senders there will be ups and downs in rate,
based on the database.

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nakodari
We were relying on Mandrill to send a lot of emails. The problem with Mailgun,
Sendgrid and others is that they're too expensive, which means they're
unaffordable by our bootstrapped startup. Is there any service that has
pricing similar to Mandrill?

~~~
w4
Mailgun and Sendgrid are too expensive? How so? Mailgun offers 10k
emails/month totally free, and it's $0.0005/email or less after that. Sendgrid
will give you 40k emails for $10/month, or 100k emails for $20/month.

If you can't afford those prices, your business has bigger problems.

