# Mandrill - Anyone using it?



## MannDude (Sep 23, 2013)

So, I just started using Mandril as of an hour or two ago. Figured I'd give it a go considering some folk have mentioned that expected emails from vpsboard have not arrived to their inbox or spam folder. So now hopefully email delivery will be much more consistent.

For those of you who have used it long-term, what are your thoughts? Any issues? Any better alternatives?


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## Jade (Sep 23, 2013)

We just started using it, I've used it in the past with other projects, but it does what it's supposed to do, so can't complain


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## SkylarM (Sep 23, 2013)

Been using it for a few months, no issues.


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## WebSearchingPro (Sep 23, 2013)

I've used it on a couple of projects, it works rather well - and the cost is relatively cheap once you get over your free limit.

Sendgrid is an alternative, BlueVM uses them but I cannot comment on its stability as I've not personally used it.


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## VPSCorey (Sep 23, 2013)

Works great, annoys with alerts when mail volume goes up or down probably just turn that off though.


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## DalComp (Sep 23, 2013)

I've been using it for about 3 months because previously gmail always mark my emails as spam. Working great since then.


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## kaniini (Sep 23, 2013)

We've been using it for a long time, it works great.


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## Dylan (Sep 23, 2013)

Amazon Simple Email Service is nice because of their flat send pricing ($.10/1,000 messages period), but Mandrill's tiered pricing structure does end up being cheaper if you send 24,000 or fewer messages per month.

You also do pay for data transfer out with SES after the first 1GB/month but considering the size of emails even if you cross that it barely adds anything.


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## Damian (Sep 23, 2013)

We've been using mandrill for some quite some time now, since about July of 2012, have had absolutely no problems with it. It's a great burden off of our shoulders to not have to worry about if our customers are getting our emails or not.


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## hzr (Sep 23, 2013)

I use www.sailthru.com and think it's far far better than Mandrill, though requires a bit more integration (not just smtp and go)


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## Cloudrck (Sep 23, 2013)

I've been using it since the beginning of this year, real glad I gave it a shot. If there is one thing I hate debugging, it's email.



hzr said:


> I use www.sailthru.com and think it's far far better than Mandrill, though requires a bit more integration (not just smtp and go)


Care to elaborate? What does sailthru do better than Mandrill?


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## peterw (Sep 24, 2013)

MannDude said:


> So, I just started using Mandril as of an hour or two ago. Figured I'd give it a go considering some folk have mentioned that expected emails from vpsboard have not arrived to their inbox or spam folder. So now hopefully email delivery will be much more consistent.
> 
> For those of you who have used it long-term, what are your thoughts? Any issues? Any better alternatives?


Using it for 4 months without issues. Did not reach the free limit.


Free up to 12k emails per month
$0.20/thousand next 1m emails per month

Cheap.


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## Wintereise (Sep 24, 2013)

Cloudrck said:


> I've been using it since the beginning of this year, real glad I gave it a shot. If there is one thing I hate debugging, it's email.
> 
> Care to elaborate? What does sailthru do better than Mandrill?



It does you no good if you use premade apps, but API based services like sailthru and postmark are infinitely better if you're a developer.

Reason being simple, smtp is a costly protocol time wise, and the operations are blocking. So to say, if you need to mail 3 clients at a time, you need to open a connection, authenticate, send, close and repeat three times with most implementations.

To transform this into non-blocking ('queuing') based operations, you either have to use something like iron.io, or Amazon SQS, or Beanstalkd, or completely ditch SMTP and go with something new.

Now, HTTP api based services like the one hazardous mentions work somewhat like this,

You call API::send($this->mailDetails), check for exceptions thrown, and call it a day. The service handles delivery, *AND* queue processing for you, and all in the same time, the operation stays non-blocking so you can proceed to the next breakpoint in code.


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## Quexis (Sep 24, 2013)

I use it for NetChat's communication emails.


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