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Good on them, but they’ve completely flubbed their absorption of Mandrill, and these days Mandrill suffers frequent production outages unbecoming of a serious e
by beager 8y ago
Good on them, but they’ve completely flubbed their absorption of Mandrill, and these days Mandrill suffers frequent production outages unbecoming of a serious email provider, and their support is abysmal. I guess part of building a big business is squeezing your customers to boost your margin.
Has anyone migrated off of Mandrill in the past few years? Where’d you go, and how was the transition?
- adrinavarro 8y agoWe choose SendGrid long time ago to unify all our mail infrastructure under one provider and it was a significant mistake. Now, we're heavily relying on SendGrid but some systems still depend on Mandrill and we're slowly migrating those as we make changes to them.
- beager 8y agoWas it the migration strategy that was a misstep or having a single point of failure for transactional email? If you're looking to support multiple transaction mail providers, any best practices you've come across to ensure that your app has a common interface to different providers?
- medmunds 8y ago> support multiple transaction mail providers One potential pitfall is keeping your blocked-email list synced between ESPs. You definitely don't want to repeatedly send to an address that has bounced or reported your email as spam, as that's a good way to get yourself into an ISP's spam filter for all its recipients. When using multiple ESPs, the best approach is maintaining and enforcing your own block list. But if you're relying on your ESPs' own block list functionality to prevent additional sends to invalid/complaining addresses, you'll either need to sync their block lists, or somehow partition things so that the same recipient email always goes through the same ESP. Nearly all transactional ESPs offer webhook notifications on bounces and complaints, but not all have an API where you can add an email to their internal block list.
- kernx16 8y agoWhy is that a mistake to rely on SendGrid?
- medmunds 8y agoNot the OP, but my personal experience has been that it was a mistake to rely on SendGrid. This is based on a 2016 incident [1] where SendGrid made unannounced changes to IP pools, resulting in sent emails being delayed for several hours or more while the new IPs warmed up. For many kinds of transactional email, several hours' delayed delivery quickly turns into multiple end users opening support cases. ("Where's my password reset?") If this had been a simple mistake, fine (all ESPs have occasional issues), but to my knowledge SendGrid has never acknowledged this as an operational error. In fact, at the time SendGrid representatives repeatedly insisted the change was made intentionally for its (paying) customers' benefit. (That said, SendGrid had some really nice tracking and segmentation dashboards, which I do miss at my new ESP.) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728
- adrinavarro 8y agoI meant Mandrill—Mandrill was a significant mistake. SendGrid is working great for us. So sorry.
- WrathOfJay 8y agoPlease elaborate on why SendGrid was a significant mistake for you. We are looking at moving to them from Mandrill, since their stability has been terrible for us.
- kernx16 8y agoI work at SendGrid, let me know if there any questions you have regarding our products.
- adrinavarro 8y agoOops, sorry. Brain fart. I meant Mandrill, Mandrill was a significant mistake. SendGrid is working great for us. So sorry.
- 1123581321 8y agoMandrill has been pretty reliable. I was certainly annoyed by the pricing and sending requirements change, but the actual cost didn’t increase much for us since we already had a Mailchimp account. That said, we have a duplicate of Mandrill’s sending infrastructure at SES and use it enough that we know it is ready for migration. We have a lot of domains (agency.) Keeping track of domain sending security for two providers is occasionally challenging, but we could move everything to solely use SES in about a week if needed.
- beager 8y agoI have my own concerns about SES since my impression is that you have to do your own IP hygiene, and you can't get "pre-warmed" IPs, so if we were to slam SES with our email traffic, our deliverability would fluctuate greatly. We don't send unsolicited email however, and only to people who confirm their email.
- WrathOfJay 8y agoYou are not kidding. We have had numerous issues with them lately. Their servers go down. API endpoints that are supposed to return json return cloudflare gateway error HTML instead... We are investigating moving to SendGrid right now. We REALLY need to find a reliable email service. It has been a shit-show and our clients are frustrated.
- dennisgorelik 8y agoWe (postjobfree.com) use Amazon SES. It is reliable and costs $1 per 10,000 emails sent.
- kernx16 8y agoI work for SendGrid as an engineer. Let me know if I can answer any of your questions.
- beager 8y agoNot the post you were replying to, but one of our biggest gripes while trying to work around Mandrill outages was the lack of idempotency keys in their API. Presumed uptime improvements aside, what does SendGrid provide in terms of idempotent requests?
- awinder 8y agoNot sure what you mean by "absorption" of Mandrill, to wit: Mandrill was always an in-house product of the mailchimp company, they just had it as a separate product vertical. My impression is that the effort to maintain the product wasn't financially viable and so it's effectively still run as a courtesy to mailchimp customers, but it's basically on life support. As for where to go -- Sendgrid and Sparkpost are popular offerings in the same space: http://blog.mandrill.com/important-changes-to-mandrill.html https://sendgrid.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-mandrill-to-sendgrid/ https://www.sparkpost.com/migration-guides/mandrill/ [big fat disclaimer -- I work at sparkpost, but trying to provide a neutral helpful comment -- hopefully I've done that :D]
- beager 8y agoThanks for the links here, I'll check out Sparkpost in addition to SendGrid. Didn't realize Sparkpost was the sanctioned escape hatch from Mandrill's own blog postings. Also I mean "absorption" because at some point Mailchimp required Mandrill users to start using Mailchimp credentials to log in. Even though they were the same company ultimately, the transition felt like an extremely sloppy acquisition!
- awinder 8y agoGotcha, that makes sense :-).
- rorykoehler 8y agoUsing Postmark and Sendgrid now.both are good but postmark edges it ux wise for me
- medmunds 8y agoI moved my side project from Mandrill to SendGrid immmediately after the “absorbtion” (Mandrill/MailChimp policy changes). But then I had to scramble to move again after an incident where SendGrid apparently felt it was OK to delay sending transactional emails by a day or two, affecting many of their paying customers. [1] Currently on Postmark, and have found them to be reliable, transparent about the very rare problem on their end, and helpful with problems on my end. Following Mandrill’s policy changes, I started maintaining a package that simplifies moving Django projects between a number of full-featured transactional ESPs. Even if you’re not on Django, you may find the list of ESPs it supports helpful. [2] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728 [2]: https://anymail.readthedocs.io/ https://anymail.readthedocs.io/
- beager 8y agoAnymail looks great, thanks! We’re on Flask but there might be some way to bridge those worlds. Appreciate your maintenance of the project.