moving from mandrill
TRANSCRIPT
Moving from MandrillTipsby Giedrius Rimkus
PlateCulture
Connects people who love cooking & hosting dinners with people who love eating authentic home cooked meals
Transactional emails
Often times, transactional emails are sent through SMTP relay or programmatically through an API.
email address confirmations
password resets
purchase receipts
"thank you for [some action]"
monthly invoices
Our choice is was Mandrill
PlateCulture + Mandrill = happy users
Potential risks
Service is offlineAcquisitions & shutdowns...
Types of acquisitions
Companies buy other companies because of: technology (Summly by Yahoo), features, products (Tumblr by Yahoo), talents, user base (Whatsapp by Facebook), brand name or trademark (Adidas by Rebook), Intelectual property (Motorola by Google) and similar reasons.
Sometimes companies just decide to shut the product down.
Time given to move
Parse (Facebook) - SaaS: ~1 yearShellyCloud - PaaS: ~6 months
Surprise from Mailchimp
All Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account beginning April 27.
We had around 2 months to move somewhere else.
Alternatives
SendGridMailgunMailJetPostmarkapp...
Our requirements
Transactional emails as a core businessReliable serviceTagsInbound parsingWebHooksCustom Metadata
SendGrid
Passed all the requirements plus had much more to offer
Terminology
SendGrid Mandrill
categories tagsunique_args metadataX-SMTPAPI X-MC-*
Tips
Support both providers using WebHooks and Inbound Parsing for a while if you don’t want to lose data. This means creating new DNS records with different subdomains.
Tips
Use whitelabels. They allow you to send through your own custom domain instead of SendGrid's default settings. This will mask the header information of your emails with your data and will improve email deliverability.
Tips
Enable Open Tracking & Click Tracking configuration for web hooks to work properly.
Don’t forget to subscribe to a SendGrid paid plan if you were sending more than 12k emails per month with Mandrill.
Tips
It is always a good idea to deploy your app to a staging environment and test the email functionality there before going live.
Thank you
Questions?
Giedrius RimkusSoftware Developer
@PlateCulture