Mandrill, made by the people from MailChimp, sponsors 50.000 free transactional emails

[horst]

for users from phpclasses.org. Today I have read a bit from this podcast. A short explanation about Mandrill and transactional emails can be found right after the introduction in the text at "Mandrill by Mailchimp promotion for PHP Classes users (1:03)".
 
You simply need to go to Mandril through a link or put in the promo code "phpclasses" on the Mandrill site. ALso they have a free plan for 12.000 per month without any promo code!

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

Looks really nice!  I'm going to look into this further.

Couple of things I wonder about:

• I see "subaccounts," but I wonder if it's possible to have a developer account with clients running under it?
• I do a lot of HIPAA-compliant projects, and this could make development a lot easier.  But is Mandrill HIPAA compliant (doesn't say so in their docs)?

Thanks for posting,

Matthew

[horst]

to 1) I have read yes. You, as a developer, can run mails on behave of different clients. You can/should create subaccounts for each client and you also can point to subdomains of your clientdomains. This can be used to only have own domain names in the links of a mail. (create a sub.domain.tld and point its CName to your mandrill subaccount)

to 2) I don't know what HIPAA-compliant is.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

I really like everything about this -- good documentation, easy API, and they use SwiftMailer.  I will try it out for sure.

But sadly, they are not HIPAA-compliant.  I was really hoping they were!

This is from their Terms of Use:

"If you're subject to regulations (like HIPAA) and you use our Service, then we won't be liable if our Service doesn't meet those requirements."

I will test this on some non-HIPAA projects, and follow progress.

Thanks again for posting,

Matthew

[pwired]

Those 12000 free emails per month sounds all great.

And all that without hidden strings ?

Are you sure they are not grabbing your headers or

other private data for their own commercial purposes

in return ?

[Joss]

12000 is the normal mailchimp free offering.

The business model is that serious list users shoot past that limit fairly early on and then it is a good earner. 

Mailchimp free offering has a Mailchimp logo at the bottom of any sent email.

[LostKobrakai]

Mailchimp uses Mandrill for the actual sending. It's the management and mail-editor what Mailchimp offers on top. Mailchimp is more casual, while Mandrill seems more for professional clients, so the advertising in the mail is understandably more useful for Mailchimp than for Mandrill. 

@pwired

They reserve the right to look into emails, if they violate the terms of use. Also as Joss said it's nice and easy for smaller companies, but their infrastructure is build for the big fishes of companies. It's just a way to get people to their service, so they later maybe use it for something which hits the limit. Thats at least more useful than letting the servers run idle. 

Secondly, emails are mostly send unencrypted, so everyone, who operates one of the hundreds of servers the mail goes through can intersept and read them. 

[Pete]

I've been using Mandrill for a year now for various projects and can't rate them highly enough.

They're great for sending emails using the SMTP classes built for ProcessWire. For example, on several occasions I've had IPs blocked by Hotmail because someone who subscribed to something marked an email as spam (yes, users do silly things like forget what they signed up to or don;t just use the unsubscribe links) and Mandrill saves you a lot of hassle by a) not letting you send to those users again if the email bounced or was marked as spam and b) ensuring your IP isn't blocked to the rest of Hotmail (or whichever other service this might happen with - isn't Hotmail Outlook.com now anyway?). It also has some great webhooks so you can write some code to let you know which customers aren't interested within your own application.

So yeah, great service that does a lot for you, lets you have sub-accounts for each client and all round protects your deliverability on business-critical applications.