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