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Mandrill Upcoming Changes


cstevensjr
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I'm looking at Amazon SES right now (recommended by MailChimp's CEO in his blog post announcing the change), but I don't have any experience with it. Anyone has used it? Easy enough to set up?

I use it to send marketing campaigns using Sendy. Works flawlessly, not complicated to set up, but not the easiest one either. Didn't test it using PW's api yet. 

SES is very cheap, my client used to pay $100-200 on Campaign Monitor and now pay less than $5. :)

Damn it. Saw the news this morning too. 

A good alternative might be Mail Gun. One of my clients uses it for quite a serious piece of their signup and customer communications.

First 10,000 emails are free too.

Thanks! I'll take a look on Mail Gun too. I heard about SendGrid, 12k free/month. 

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What a great way to lose a lot of business - causing hassle for thousands of existing customers!

I get that there are always reasons for making hard decisions like this, but the way they've done it (and potentially the timescale if you have dozens of client accounts) sucks!

Their new $20 plan also only gets you 25k emails a month and Mailgun gets 50k for the same price. I wonder which I'll be looking at next...

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TL;DR postmarkapp.com looks like a fabulous drop-in replacement for Mandrill now the proposed pricing for Mandrill looks like a price gouge (for low volume users like me).

I have just completed initial testing with postmarkapp.com, the service I very nearly went with over a year ago.

It's fabulous, almost identical to Mandrill in how to connect (via SMTP at least) and I was able to get my first two sites converted in very little time.

I have just asked their support people to confirm what I have read, that the pricing model is perfect for low volume, transactional email of the type I need (around 300 to 500 per month across all the sites I work with).

The pricing is NOT the same as the proposed new Mandrill pricing but is like the 'old' Mandrill pricing, awaiting confirmation but it looks like I will use less than 5,000 credits a year and that will cost just $7.50.

So for me that's $7.50 rather than the proposed Mandrill/MailChimp pricing on 12x$20: $240.

As soon as I have completed the conversion of my other sites I will post here with tips on what I needed to do to use Postmark as a near-drop-in replacement for Mandrill (it's east but I found a few steps that helped).

PS: Looks like the first 25,000 emails are free too.

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For those interested in the Mailgun module, just letting you know it's ready to use. I'd appreciate you guys giving me a hand in testing things, let me know if you encounter weird encoding errors (it's been tested with Litmus and should be ok but you never know) or anything else. The only thing that you should know is that there is a requirement for PHP >5.5 only if you use the attachment functionality, as the cURL functions I'm using for files (CURLFiles class vs @) requires it, though that will be fixed in a newer version by the end of the week.

Please file reports on the repo tracker, not on the forums, it's going to be much easier tracking things this way.

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If someone really needs lots of free emails (100.000): https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing

And a blogpost regarding future plans :Dhttps://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-sparkpost-pricing/

They look pretty good too and that announcement is really interesting from a business perspective. Sparkpost was among a few others I was investigating, but felt like the sudden change in pricing could as well be reversed and 100K free forever felt a bit too good to be true. The thing that really annoyed me from Mandrill was the fact that they pulled the rug beneath our feet in a really painful way, and that commitment from Sparkpost is very welcome.

I will probably also implement their API, based on the code from the Mailgun module. It's slightly more complex but not by a big margin. Choice is good. :)

Sending through the API is so much faster, SMTP just kills servers on large volumes! 

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  • 1 month later...

Yeah, great job mailchimp/mandrill. I've an event running on mandrill up until end of the week. Now I thought it would be easy, just connect the account to mailchimp and pay those 20€ once. But it's not quite that. The mailchimp account does need to be monthly payed to be linked to a mandrill acc and I'm now hoping I can switch it back before the big 400€ monthly cost come in (lots of subscribers, but very few newsletter per month). I'm really curious why one would even think of using mandrill further.

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I wrote to them (even though I knew it would make no difference) in order to note that for my use-case [send very few emails per month] the new price model was completely inappropriate; I used about 2% of the potential emails I had to pay for per month; 98% of my fee being effectively unused. The next month wash and repeat.

I went from being a fan to a lost (low spend) client. VERY happy with http://postmarkapp.com/.

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No Steve, not seen before but it looks very nice. I'm very happy with Postmark and yesterday spent a while converting Textpattern, Perch and PW sites over to it, so I'll likely stay there now. But if they do something like MailChimp made Mandrill do then I will certainly check them out—thanks for the recommend! ^_^

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TL;DR postmarkapp.com looks like a fabulous drop-in replacement for Mandrill now the proposed pricing for Mandrill looks like a price gouge (for low volume users like me).

I have just completed initial testing with postmarkapp.com, the service I very nearly went with over a year ago.

Hi Alan

Are you using Postmarkapp with Wire Mail SMTP at all?

My emails are being delivered but not beign recorded by PM analytics. 

Postmarkapp support asked me for a header sample from the email and say the email is not being routed via their service.

Seems odd to me as I have the correct settings in WireMailSMTP and they verify correctly when I try the test settings now

Any other special setup required there?

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Hi Peter, Yes I am using it with Horsts WireMail SMTP module and it does work, I've converted 5 or so sites over, all AOK.

I'll grab a screenshot of the setup page and post it here in a sec...

Before I do, one thing to check in an emails header is "mailed-by: pm.mtasv.net" - if I see that then I know it's come via Postmark.

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