14 ms·

Mandrill’s Betrayal

323 points by jjude 11y ago

jessaustin 11y ago
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.
- brightball 11y ago
  Not necessarily. Mailchimp is incredibly overpriced for what it does once you get past the lowest price levels. Signing up for Mandrill or Sendgrid or Mailgun, then using one of dozens of self-hosted newsletter options (some free, some one time paid with support) is much more cost effective. For really high volume just install your own licensed PowerMTA server from Port25, which is what Mandrill runs on anyway if I'm not mistaken. The part of the service that you're paying for with Mailchimp is the actual delivery management, which virtually any of the existing transactional email systems including SES can undercut on price almost overnight. That's one reason I never touched Mandrill because the low end pricing model didn't make sense for a company like Mailchimp with such a high price point for it's own services.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  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-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill- https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206251597-Wha...
- deleted 11y ago
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paulbennett 11y ago
> 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.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  That is largely correct. It was intended as a purely transaction / alerting / etc. mail platform and not for bulk/marketing emails. However, I never went over the free limits with that sort of mail which I suspect was the problem. My guess is 90% of the revenue was people using it for bulk email and so they figure forcing them to MailChimp isn't a major loss.
  - kidcoach 11y ago
    This has to be the goal of the change. Move people who into paying mailchimp customers who are taking advantage of mandrill. The issue is they alienate all the people who's problem set doesn't fall into mailchimp's offering. Who knows what that percentage is but my guess is over 80%, so they understand they are screwing over the majority to make a profit off the minority. This is from Ben at mandrill: > "I can say today that–believe it or not–there is a subset of Mandrill customers who want combined functionality and pricing, so it’s not as illogical as it seems on the surface (also, we’ve lost many more potential customers like these by having two separate products and brands). There’s another subset who want a utlitarian service provider, and who would understandably find the new pricing unsuitable."
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      Yeah but when I originally signed up I was told that was the purpose back in 2013.
- 11y ago
marcusr 11y ago
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.
adenner 11y ago
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.
- clupprich 11y ago
  +1 for mailgun. Their API is awesome and they even offer things click tracking (also in their API).
  - ianamartin 11y ago
    Another vote for Mailgun. I use them for all my side projects, monitoring, error reports, basically everything gets hooked into my FastMail account with all the right aliases I need, and it works very well. I've never gone over my free allocation even when I have a dozen or so side projects up and testing.
    - gknoy 11y ago
      Wow. Thank you guys for the suggestion. I really like that the first thing I see on the Mailgun landing page is sample code for calling the API, and the second thing I see is a pricing calculator.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  + 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 11y ago
LyndsySimon 11y ago
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.
Exuma 11y ago
I hated this change, and switched to Mailgun immediately. I never liked mailchimp at all, and this sealed the deal.
atemerev 11y ago
I second for Mailgun. Works perfectly well.
- brightball 11y ago
  Very underrated service. The level of control that their inbound email system allows is impressive.
scosman 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      The real kicker: will Mailchimp drop support completely later on... next month? I've no confidence in them anymore. We're moving asap.
- icelancer 11y ago
  This is where I am at. This is insanity.
- mlapeter 11y ago
  Agreed, I'm surprised the 4x price increase is not mentioned more often. Personally I can understand moving away from a free offering, especially if they're having trouble with spammers, but to quadruple pricing out of the blue? For sites, like mine, built around a huge amount of transactional email (scheduling group gaming sessions and notifying your group by email), a 4x increase is essentially no different than just shutting down. They have their reasons, and now I have mine, to never use a mailchimp product again.
woodcut 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
20years 11y ago
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
alexgaribay 11y ago
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.
waffle_ss 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from most spam filters?
  - waffle_ss 11y ago
    I think most generic EC2 instances you'd spin up are hopelessly blacklisted, but I would hope that SES would be less affected by that since AWS would keep its address ranges separated from the EC2 wild west. But after Googling SES deliverability it seems like SES may have suffered a slight amount from some lax spam reporting standards - the results seem a bit stale so not sure how valid it is any more. Hopefully using DKIM and SPF will help lessen the blow.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    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.
dylanz 11y ago
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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! How many emails are you sending out a month? And do you do any newsletters?
- jonathanbull 11y ago
  If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, can I suggest you check out a project I've been working on for the last year or so? https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com
misiti3780 11y ago
Can someone explain to me why they would do this ? I cannot think of a reason why they would stop providing this service.
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
Benjamin_Dobell 11y ago
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.
MrBlue 11y ago
They must be popping bottles in the Mailgun offices today. :)
jqueryin 11y ago
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.
- nhangen 11y ago
  This is where we're at too. We've long been evangelizing Mailchimp and Mandrill in our product, and as a result have sent plenty of customers their way. In fact, our product almost relies on them as a pair. Now, because of the ToS, we have to remove it from our product and port our users somewhere else...and fast. We also have to port our own servers to another service, and fast. I remember the day we finally had enough subscribers to actually start paying Mailchimp money, and now all I can think about is how much disdain I have for them. Unless they reverse course on this issue, we will be shouting "down with Mailchimp" from the rooftops to all of our customers.
  - Bluestrike2 11y ago
    Even if they reverse course (or just delay it for a bit longer to give their users more time to switch), I think people are going to be shouting "down with Mailchimp" for quite some time. It's really hard to trust someone after they've screwed you thoroughly.
  - ibmthrowaway218 11y ago
    > We also have to port our own servers to another service, and fast. Once you've done that you should look at what other services you rely significantly upon and see about mitigating the risk there by having an alternative ready to go (or even sharing the load). At a previous startup we realised we relied wholly upon Mandrill and so reimplemented the sending code so that half of the emails went out via Mandrill and the other half by SendGrid. A stunt like the above just requires a quick reconfigure to make all emails go via the alternative provider whilst we (with less panic) add another new alternative provider to share the load. It also helps build up a positive reputation before cutting over straight away. (This wasn't about splitting the emails amongst free tiers to keep it free, we were far away from moving up to a paid tier even with all emails going through one provider.)
mangeletti 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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...
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - troels 11y ago
    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.
  - jimmypesto 11y ago
    100% agree. I'm in the exact same boat. I'm moving to SES as well for the same reasons.
- derefr 11y ago
jdstafford 11y ago
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
- ryanczak 11y ago
  Check out the Sparkpost Mandrill migration guide: https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide
- richleland 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
rrggrr 11y ago
Goodbye Mailchimp. $500 per month soon to be spent elsewhere.
MicahWedemeyer 11y ago
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?
- evantahler 11y ago
  This exactly!
- ajonit 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
etjossem 11y ago
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
- msbarnett 11y ago
  Disclosure: I'm not in any way financially linked to SendGrid. A startup I used to work at used SendGrid. I have nothing but good things to say about the experience. I liked it better than Mandrill, which I've used more recently.
- Strom 11y ago
  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
  - etjossem 11y ago
    Email from Mailgun's shared IPs is being flagged as spam by Hotmail and AOL, which may indicate insufficient warmup with those services (e.g. Hotmail is not familiar with some of their shared IPs yet, and suspects them of sending spam until proven otherwise). Methodology: a mock verification email with properly structured markup, a verification button, and no marketing content, sent to each provider. https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare#how https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare#how
  - purge 11y ago
    We had issues every few months because the server we were assigned would be added to a RBL. Customers would notice, we'd talk to Mailgun and they would move us to another server. rinse, repeat. The only way to avoid this was to get a dedicated IP which is an additional $59 / month. I'm not sure why Mailgun couldn't detect this themselves, maybe they do now.
codegeek 11y ago
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
w4 11y ago
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.
nakodari 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- richleland 11y ago
  Hi nakodari - SparkPost is matching Mandrill's pricing and offers 100k/mo free plan. Check out our migration guide: https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide
- robalfonso 11y ago
  Also elasticmail.com, so far it looks like we'll implement sparkpost and elasticmail for redundancy.
- techdragon 11y ago
  Elastic email seems like an excellent substitute for "cheapest per email cost" type email needs. They are a front runner candidate for me in a lot of use cases.
agopaul 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    You know what else is super unreliable? The account you are posting under. Enjoy your hellban!
- cridenour 11y ago
  We love Postmark - they're a bit more expensive but the service is great and the product is rock solid.
sideproject 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 :)
ne01 11y ago
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-mandatory.html http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain-verification-m... "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.
johng 11y ago
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.
deleted 11y ago
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sarreph 11y ago
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.
_Codemonkeyism 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
- etjossem 11y ago
  Straight from our lawyer: SendGrid offers EU Model Clauses upon request. My email's in my profile - let me know if you need the details.
justinlilly 11y ago
Reminder: SendGrid fired Adria Richards for calling out inappropriate behavior at a tech conference. If this bothers you, please put your dollars in a place more in-line with your values. http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fired-by-sendgrid-for-outting-developers-on-twitter/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fi...
- mercurial 11y ago
  Oh good grief, not this again.
  - Jgrubb 11y ago
    You knew it was coming.
  - rlx02 11y ago
    Yeah, we shouldn't mention bad company behavior on a thread about... bad company behavior.
  - manarth 11y ago
    The ethicality/morality of a potential supplier is a legitimate consideration for many organisations, and in some cases is written into the organisation's policies. For example, WWF procurement[1]: > "We monitor and select goods and services carefully to avoid those that are harmful or damaging to both the user and the environment." > "we require suppliers to complete an environmental and ethical questionnaire" Whether you agree with the behaviour, disagree, or even don't care, it's a legitimate question to raise when talking about alternative suppliers. [1] http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/other_publications/environmental_report/environmental_report_archive/environmental_report_20072/procurement/ http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/other_publications/environme...
    - reality_czech 11y ago
      Why would the world wrestling federation make their suppliers fill out a questionaire? Is the first question "do you smell what the rock is cooking?"
losvedir 11y ago
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
tehwebguy 11y ago
Did they promise never to do this or something?
rloc 11y ago
Interesting that my mandrill dashboard shows I can send 62000 emails "absolutely free". I'm on the free tier.
Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
Quick comical irony break: the heads-up email Mandrill sent us about this went to our spam folder.
55555 11y ago
What a strange decision. They are murdering an amazingly successful business.
tbrooks 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
Bummer. We were huge users of Mandrill. Never loved the UI, but it got the job done. Now, Sendgrid vs Mailgun?
apitts 11y ago
@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
jonathanbull 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
isachintiwari 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      [citation needed] No one gets 100% deliverability, and highest inbox rate for all senders requires serious proof.
      - isachintiwari 11y ago
        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.
mcbobo 11y ago
Hey, I wrote a quick module / class for Rails for Mandrill Users trying to go to SendGrid using their SMTP API module. It's far from perfect or done, but it's something to get going... https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp/blob/master/RE...

323 points by jjude 11y ago

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.

brightball 11y ago
Not necessarily. Mailchimp is incredibly overpriced for what it does once you get past the lowest price levels. Signing up for Mandrill or Sendgrid or Mailgun, then using one of dozens of self-hosted newsletter options (some free, some one time paid with support) is much more cost effective. For really high volume just install your own licensed PowerMTA server from Port25, which is what Mandrill runs on anyway if I'm not mistaken. The part of the service that you're paying for with Mailchimp is the actual delivery management, which virtually any of the existing transactional email systems including SES can undercut on price almost overnight. That's one reason I never touched Mandrill because the low end pricing model didn't make sense for a company like Mailchimp with such a high price point for it's own services.
ceejayoz 11y ago
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-What-types-of-email-can-I-send-with-Mandrill- https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206251597-Wha...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

paulbennett 11y ago

> 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.

fweespeech 11y ago
That is largely correct. It was intended as a purely transaction / alerting / etc. mail platform and not for bulk/marketing emails. However, I never went over the free limits with that sort of mail which I suspect was the problem. My guess is 90% of the revenue was people using it for bulk email and so they figure forcing them to MailChimp isn't a major loss.
- kidcoach 11y ago
  This has to be the goal of the change. Move people who into paying mailchimp customers who are taking advantage of mandrill. The issue is they alienate all the people who's problem set doesn't fall into mailchimp's offering. Who knows what that percentage is but my guess is over 80%, so they understand they are screwing over the majority to make a profit off the minority. This is from Ben at mandrill: > "I can say today that–believe it or not–there is a subset of Mandrill customers who want combined functionality and pricing, so it’s not as illogical as it seems on the surface (also, we’ve lost many more potential customers like these by having two separate products and brands). There’s another subset who want a utlitarian service provider, and who would understandably find the new pricing unsuitable."
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Yeah but when I originally signed up I was told that was the purpose back in 2013.
11y ago

marcusr 11y ago

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.

adenner 11y ago

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.

clupprich 11y ago
+1 for mailgun. Their API is awesome and they even offer things click tracking (also in their API).
- ianamartin 11y ago
  Another vote for Mailgun. I use them for all my side projects, monitoring, error reports, basically everything gets hooked into my FastMail account with all the right aliases I need, and it works very well. I've never gone over my free allocation even when I have a dozen or so side projects up and testing.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    Wow. Thank you guys for the suggestion. I really like that the first thing I see on the Mailgun landing page is sample code for calling the API, and the second thing I see is a pricing calculator.
mangeletti 11y ago
+ 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 11y ago

LyndsySimon 11y ago

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.

Exuma 11y ago

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

atemerev 11y ago

I second for Mailgun. Works perfectly well.

brightball 11y ago
Very underrated service. The level of control that their inbound email system allows is impressive.

scosman 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    The real kicker: will Mailchimp drop support completely later on... next month? I've no confidence in them anymore. We're moving asap.
icelancer 11y ago
This is where I am at. This is insanity.
mlapeter 11y ago
Agreed, I'm surprised the 4x price increase is not mentioned more often. Personally I can understand moving away from a free offering, especially if they're having trouble with spammers, but to quadruple pricing out of the blue? For sites, like mine, built around a huge amount of transactional email (scheduling group gaming sessions and notifying your group by email), a 4x increase is essentially no different than just shutting down. They have their reasons, and now I have mine, to never use a mailchimp product again.

woodcut 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

20years 11y ago

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

alexgaribay 11y ago

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.

waffle_ss 11y ago

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 11y ago
Doesn't any email originating form an AWS server get big marks against it from most spam filters?
- waffle_ss 11y ago
  I think most generic EC2 instances you'd spin up are hopelessly blacklisted, but I would hope that SES would be less affected by that since AWS would keep its address ranges separated from the EC2 wild west. But after Googling SES deliverability it seems like SES may have suffered a slight amount from some lax spam reporting standards - the results seem a bit stale so not sure how valid it is any more. Hopefully using DKIM and SPF will help lessen the blow.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  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.

dylanz 11y ago

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 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! How many emails are you sending out a month? And do you do any newsletters?
jonathanbull 11y ago
If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, can I suggest you check out a project I've been working on for the last year or so? https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com

misiti3780 11y ago

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

tdaltonc 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

Benjamin_Dobell 11y ago

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.

MrBlue 11y ago

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

jqueryin 11y ago

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.

nhangen 11y ago
This is where we're at too. We've long been evangelizing Mailchimp and Mandrill in our product, and as a result have sent plenty of customers their way. In fact, our product almost relies on them as a pair. Now, because of the ToS, we have to remove it from our product and port our users somewhere else...and fast. We also have to port our own servers to another service, and fast. I remember the day we finally had enough subscribers to actually start paying Mailchimp money, and now all I can think about is how much disdain I have for them. Unless they reverse course on this issue, we will be shouting "down with Mailchimp" from the rooftops to all of our customers.
- Bluestrike2 11y ago
  Even if they reverse course (or just delay it for a bit longer to give their users more time to switch), I think people are going to be shouting "down with Mailchimp" for quite some time. It's really hard to trust someone after they've screwed you thoroughly.
- ibmthrowaway218 11y ago
  > We also have to port our own servers to another service, and fast. Once you've done that you should look at what other services you rely significantly upon and see about mitigating the risk there by having an alternative ready to go (or even sharing the load). At a previous startup we realised we relied wholly upon Mandrill and so reimplemented the sending code so that half of the emails went out via Mandrill and the other half by SendGrid. A stunt like the above just requires a quick reconfigure to make all emails go via the alternative provider whilst we (with less panic) add another new alternative provider to share the load. It also helps build up a positive reputation before cutting over straight away. (This wasn't about splitting the emails amongst free tiers to keep it free, we were far away from moving up to a paid tier even with all emails going through one provider.)

mangeletti 11y ago

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 11y ago
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...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- troels 11y ago
  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.
- jimmypesto 11y ago
  100% agree. I'm in the exact same boat. I'm moving to SES as well for the same reasons.
derefr 11y ago

jdstafford 11y ago

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

ryanczak 11y ago
Check out the Sparkpost Mandrill migration guide: https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide
richleland 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

rrggrr 11y ago

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

MicahWedemeyer 11y ago

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?

evantahler 11y ago
This exactly!
ajonit 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

etjossem 11y ago

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

msbarnett 11y ago
Disclosure: I'm not in any way financially linked to SendGrid. A startup I used to work at used SendGrid. I have nothing but good things to say about the experience. I liked it better than Mandrill, which I've used more recently.
Strom 11y ago
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
- etjossem 11y ago
  Email from Mailgun's shared IPs is being flagged as spam by Hotmail and AOL, which may indicate insufficient warmup with those services (e.g. Hotmail is not familiar with some of their shared IPs yet, and suspects them of sending spam until proven otherwise). Methodology: a mock verification email with properly structured markup, a verification button, and no marketing content, sent to each provider. https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare#how https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare#how
- purge 11y ago
  We had issues every few months because the server we were assigned would be added to a RBL. Customers would notice, we'd talk to Mailgun and they would move us to another server. rinse, repeat. The only way to avoid this was to get a dedicated IP which is an additional $59 / month. I'm not sure why Mailgun couldn't detect this themselves, maybe they do now.

codegeek 11y ago

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

w4 11y ago

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.

nakodari 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
richleland 11y ago
Hi nakodari - SparkPost is matching Mandrill's pricing and offers 100k/mo free plan. Check out our migration guide: https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide https://www.sparkpost.com/mandrill-migration-guide
robalfonso 11y ago
Also elasticmail.com, so far it looks like we'll implement sparkpost and elasticmail for redundancy.
techdragon 11y ago
Elastic email seems like an excellent substitute for "cheapest per email cost" type email needs. They are a front runner candidate for me in a lot of use cases.

agopaul 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  You know what else is super unreliable? The account you are posting under. Enjoy your hellban!
cridenour 11y ago
We love Postmark - they're a bit more expensive but the service is great and the product is rock solid.

sideproject 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 :)

ne01 11y ago

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-mandatory.html http://blog.mandrill.com/we-are-making-domain-verification-m... "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.

johng 11y ago

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.

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sarreph 11y ago

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.

_Codemonkeyism 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
etjossem 11y ago
Straight from our lawyer: SendGrid offers EU Model Clauses upon request. My email's in my profile - let me know if you need the details.

justinlilly 11y ago

Reminder: SendGrid fired Adria Richards for calling out inappropriate behavior at a tech conference. If this bothers you, please put your dollars in a place more in-line with your values. http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fired-by-sendgrid-for-outting-developers-on-twitter/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fi...

mercurial 11y ago
Oh good grief, not this again.
- Jgrubb 11y ago
  You knew it was coming.
- rlx02 11y ago
  Yeah, we shouldn't mention bad company behavior on a thread about... bad company behavior.
- manarth 11y ago
  The ethicality/morality of a potential supplier is a legitimate consideration for many organisations, and in some cases is written into the organisation's policies. For example, WWF procurement[1]: > "We monitor and select goods and services carefully to avoid those that are harmful or damaging to both the user and the environment." > "we require suppliers to complete an environmental and ethical questionnaire" Whether you agree with the behaviour, disagree, or even don't care, it's a legitimate question to raise when talking about alternative suppliers. [1] http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/other_publications/environmental_report/environmental_report_archive/environmental_report_20072/procurement/ http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/other_publications/environme...
  - reality_czech 11y ago
    Why would the world wrestling federation make their suppliers fill out a questionaire? Is the first question "do you smell what the rock is cooking?"

losvedir 11y ago

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

tehwebguy 11y ago

Did they promise never to do this or something?

rloc 11y ago

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

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago

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

55555 11y ago

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

tbrooks 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago

Bummer. We were huge users of Mandrill. Never loved the UI, but it got the job done. Now, Sendgrid vs Mailgun?

apitts 11y ago

@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

jonathanbull 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

isachintiwari 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    [citation needed] No one gets 100% deliverability, and highest inbox rate for all senders requires serious proof.
    - isachintiwari 11y ago
      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.

mcbobo 11y ago

Hey, I wrote a quick module / class for Rails for Mandrill Users trying to go to SendGrid using their SMTP API module. It's far from perfect or done, but it's something to get going... https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/mcbobo/sendgrid-rails-smtp/blob/master/RE...