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Mandrill pauses email sending without prior notification

3 points by kehers 11y ago

This is the second time I am experiencing this with Mandrill. Email sending was paused without notifying the account email. In both instance (2 different sites/accounts), it took hours to notice users are not receiving emails and even when we did, we were checking the wrong source for the problem. This is really unprofessional. If for any reason email sending should be paused, I think the email on file should at least be notified. Some time critical messages are being sent via those emails. Anyone experienced this too?

cyberpanther 11y ago
Haven't used Mandrill but in the past used the parent MailChimp a lot. While the service was great most of the time, when we ran into issues, MailChimp support sucked. It was hard to get issues resolved and often times they would not resolve the right issues in the first place. In my opinion, if you have a high amount of email transactions, I would not use MailChimp or Mandrill because they don't back up their service with a good enterprise level support.
- davismwfl 11y ago
  Who do you use now? I haven't experienced any support issues with Mandrill yet, although I have heard others say they are slow to respond and aren't always very helpful.
davismwfl 11y ago
We send out quite a bit of email via mandrill (as well as SES) and haven't ever experienced this. They should alert you no matter and I am surprised they didn't. As for mandrill what is your deliverability rate and reputation? We generally maintain just shy of 98% deliverability and an "excellent" reputation on their dashboard. We also follow all the rules for canSPAM even on transactional emails where technically you could get away without some of it. We developed an automated list cleansing system to make sure we keep hard bounces from getting resent, fixes common typos in domains, only retry soft bounces twice for the same campaign etc. The list cleansing helped us go from 95% deliverability and a "Good" reputation up to the 97.5+ and "excellent", which for us helps our clients. Also, another point, you can use sub-accounts to manage higher risk campaigns etc which can help prevent some of the headaches. Not that this solves mandrill not notifying you, but out of curiosity, do you have webhooks setup? We extensively use webhooks to tell us what is happening and while they don't directly tell you sending has been paused (that I know of), the status of the emails in the webhooks would tell you something is wrong. I know for our platform we have a small component we wrote that monitors when email is being sent and expects to see the statuses updated fairly quickly, if it doesn't we get alerted, or if certain percentages of emails start coming back with "bad" statuses as we defined them we get an alert. I would think if you are sending enough email and using any third party email gateway you would want the same thing.
codegeek 11y ago
I am an overall happy customer of Mandrill. But they have a reputation system which sets a hourly quota. If your reputation gets hurt, your hourly quota could go down significantly. I had a client who once got tagged as a spammer and that brought down the hourly emails quota to literally 2 digits and it was in thousands before. But mandrill is very good at improving the reputation as well if you use it correctly. Also, they do send you emails everytime your hourly quota is adjusted. So that is your signal to check and ensure that emails can still be sent.

3 points by kehers 11y ago

cyberpanther 11y ago

Haven't used Mandrill but in the past used the parent MailChimp a lot. While the service was great most of the time, when we ran into issues, MailChimp support sucked. It was hard to get issues resolved and often times they would not resolve the right issues in the first place. In my opinion, if you have a high amount of email transactions, I would not use MailChimp or Mandrill because they don't back up their service with a good enterprise level support.

davismwfl 11y ago
Who do you use now? I haven't experienced any support issues with Mandrill yet, although I have heard others say they are slow to respond and aren't always very helpful.

davismwfl 11y ago

We send out quite a bit of email via mandrill (as well as SES) and haven't ever experienced this. They should alert you no matter and I am surprised they didn't. As for mandrill what is your deliverability rate and reputation? We generally maintain just shy of 98% deliverability and an "excellent" reputation on their dashboard. We also follow all the rules for canSPAM even on transactional emails where technically you could get away without some of it. We developed an automated list cleansing system to make sure we keep hard bounces from getting resent, fixes common typos in domains, only retry soft bounces twice for the same campaign etc. The list cleansing helped us go from 95% deliverability and a "Good" reputation up to the 97.5+ and "excellent", which for us helps our clients. Also, another point, you can use sub-accounts to manage higher risk campaigns etc which can help prevent some of the headaches. Not that this solves mandrill not notifying you, but out of curiosity, do you have webhooks setup? We extensively use webhooks to tell us what is happening and while they don't directly tell you sending has been paused (that I know of), the status of the emails in the webhooks would tell you something is wrong. I know for our platform we have a small component we wrote that monitors when email is being sent and expects to see the statuses updated fairly quickly, if it doesn't we get alerted, or if certain percentages of emails start coming back with "bad" statuses as we defined them we get an alert. I would think if you are sending enough email and using any third party email gateway you would want the same thing.

codegeek 11y ago

I am an overall happy customer of Mandrill. But they have a reputation system which sets a hourly quota. If your reputation gets hurt, your hourly quota could go down significantly. I had a client who once got tagged as a spammer and that brought down the hourly emails quota to literally 2 digits and it was in thousands before. But mandrill is very good at improving the reputation as well if you use it correctly. Also, they do send you emails everytime your hourly quota is adjusted. So that is your signal to check and ensure that emails can still be sent.