All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Mandrill soon becoming a paid add-on of MailChimp )-:
Hello, everyone!
Has just received a newsletter from the Mandrill team.
Hello XYZ,
>
We're writing to let you know about some significant changes that will affect your Mandrill account.
Going forward, all Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and verify ownership of all sending domains. Here's the timeline: Starting 3/16, all new Mandrill users will create accounts through MailChimp, and current Mandrill users can merge their existing Mandrill account with a monthly MailChimp account. Current users will have until 4/27 to merge their accounts.
Why we're making this change
The MailChimp team built Mandrill in 2012 as a transactional email tool. Mandrill has always been under the MailChimp umbrella, but it has functioned as a completely separate product. Mandrill is now becoming an optional add-on to paid MailChimp accounts. This is a strategic change we're making to close the gap between the two products and focus on the MailChimp marketing platform. MailChimp is designed for marketing, and Mandrill is designed for transactional messages. Each is powerful on its own, and offering Mandrill as an add-on makes MailChimp even more powerful for our small business and e-commerce customers. Our CEO and cofounder Ben Chestnut wrote more about the changes on the MailChimp blog.
What you need to know
The application's functionality and look and feel are not changing at this time. Here are the important changes that will affect your account:
- Starting today, Mandrill will adopt MailChimp's Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy. These terms reinforce that Mandrill should be used for transactional email, and bulk email/email marketing campaigns should be sent through MailChimp. In addition, MailChimp's Privacy Policy, which has always covered Mandrill, has been updated. If you have any questions about our policy changes, please email [email protected].
- To continue using Mandrill, all users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account by 4/27.
- All Mandrill users will be required to verify their sending domains and add SPF and DKIM records by 4/27. This is already in effect for new Mandrill users.
- Starting 3/16, all new Mandrill accounts will be created and accessed through MailChimp.
- Starting 3/16, the Mandrill mobile application will no longer be available for installation. It will remain functional for existing users until 4/27.
- Our billing and pricing model is also changing. MailChimp will generate one consolidated bill that covers your MailChimp and Mandrill charges. Mandrill credits will be sold in blocks of 25,000 emails. Blocks will start at $20 per month. This goes into effect once your accounts are merged.
- Any existing discounts, free credits, and free accounts will no longer be valid once your accounts are merged.
What you need to do
- If you already have a paid monthly MailChimp account, you’ll be able to merge your accounts starting on 3/16. We’ll send detailed instructions at that time.
- If you don't have a paid monthly MailChimp account and decide to create one, you can go to mailchimp.com and do so at any time. You'll be able to merge your accounts starting on 3/16. We'll send detailed instructions at that time.
- If you haven't already done so, you'll need to add SPF and DKIM records and verify ownership of your sending domains. Here's an article explaining how to do that. Starting 4/27, Mandrill will not send any email from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records, including public domains like gmail.com and yahoo.com.
If you don't have a paid monthly MailChimp account merged with your Mandrill account by 4/27, then your Mandrill account will be disabled.
If you have questions or need technical support, please log in to your Mandrill account and click Support in your dashboard. We've made support available to all users on free and paid accounts.
We know this is disruptive, and we understand that it may affect your decision to use Mandrill. Please know that we carefully considered these changes. The new structure will allow us to create more flexible products and better serve our customers. Thanks for using Mandrill, and we hope to welcome you to MailChimp soon.
— The Mandrill team
Been on the Mandrill's free tier for over a year now and was happy with the service.
Pity it's becoming paid, because $20 per month is out of our small budget.
Are there any other good alternatives to Mandrill?
I need to send 10 mails per day on average from our domain.
I'm considering setting up a mail server, but not sure if it's a good idea to spend my time maintaining a server delivering only a few emails daily, and also I would be missing some nice features of Mandrill, such as templates, mail opens tracking, link click tracking etc.
Thanks.
Comments
Check out mxroute.com @Jarland
And if you want to get really cheap try a good shared hoster with an admin panel.
Sendgrid?
Go with mxroute
Yea I got this as well. I like the service but will probably be changing to either send grid or SES
Also got this.. this sucks as I've gone through the effort of integrating the API.
Well that sucks... now to reconfigure a load of applications.
Headache, many things need to reconfigure now...
Indeed, Mandrill also has other nice features apart from API. Templates for example are a very handy one.
Will probably give SendGrid a shot which I've forgotten about (thanks @jemaltz for reminding us).
Mandrill has some nice features like mail open tracking, link click tracking etc. which SendGrid may be lacking or providing them only with their paid plans.
I did as well. Looks like I'm playing with sendgrid's api tonight and see how similar it is to mandrill.
@black
Would appreciate if you dropped us a brief review!
SendGrid supports those features on the free plan (up to 12,000 emails per month).
SES is the cheap option. Sendgrid is good, Mailgun is good, Smtp2go is good.. There's plenty of choice.
I'm already using Mailgun for personal purposes and Sendgrid at work because of the wonderful integration that Sendgrid and Azure have.
Actually 25,000 if you register from Azure.
I hope they realise not everyone sending a ton if emails has any use for marketing, granted MailChimp is nice but all I, and most people I know who use mandrill, is a cheap and reliable way to send a ton of important emails on time and without having to worry about monthly costs for months with little activity
Templates are actually really handy, does anyone else offer this?
Not bothered about link tracking, I moved our end user control panel away from horrible plain text emails and templates was one of the things which lured me into Mandrill.
fyi, I use meta tags in conjunction w/ precreated templates
Yes, Merge Tags saved me from a headache of generating personalized emails. Will be missing them a lot.
I'm looking at sendgrid and mailgun, both APIs seem very easy to use (even easier than mandrillapp). During sign up, sendgrid required company name, info, and address. Mailgun required verification via SMS.
Update: I decided to use mailgun. Super easy to to use and imo the API calls via cURL were a lot easier than mandrillapp.
Fuck, this isn't fun. They could've given some additional time to make the switch at least...
Oh, and seems like Mailgun deleted the (inactive) account I had with them. How nice...
any alternative that has a free tier or at least dirt cheap?
I don't always send emails but when I do I want them to go straight to the inbox
@vfuse
Got this email too this morning... maybe I will go to sendgrid because of this.
Mailgun is a good alternative (as already mentioned) that offers a free tier (<=10,000 free emails).
The biggest change for us is the 4X price hike hidden down in bullet point 6. Used to be $0.20 per 1000. Now it's $0.80 per 1000.
We're looking at the alternatives but have been very happy with Mandrill.
is it just me or is that email have a very arrogant tone?
SendGrid works like a charm for us, and they also have a free 12k emails/mo package.
This sucks. I have had to add rerouting emails for a couple of websites into my schedule for the day.
I agree with @raindog308, the email did sound a bit rude.
Seems they are basically forcing the smaller website owners with free transactional email plans to suck it up and pay for something they don't need in the form of newsletter management subscription through MailChimp, or just make themselves scarce.
Anyway, Mailgun, Amazon SES & Sendgrid to the rescue!
They're also running off those of us who send hundreds of thousands of emails a month through the service by jacking the price up 4x.
I think it does too
Thanks - thats a great hint. It also allowed for instant provisioning. Also, not sure if their public free plan allows for multiple smtp credentials, but the plan from azure seems to support that.
SES is not cheap if you are sending attachments. My average email weight is 650 kb, I pay 0.26$ per 1000, except 0.09$ without attachments. So I have to pay huge bills.