Recently MailChimp announced that they are launching the public beta of their new Mandrill SMTP service. The service was born out of many customer requests which originated from the use of Amazon’s SES service through MailChimp’s STS: that service is also meant for transactional email, but limited in flexibility.
To go beyond those limitations, Mandrill was developed and the service is capable of the following things:
- Uses MailChimp’s awesome email delivery engine
- Has a simple and powerful API
- Allows simple sending directly using SMTP
- Tracks opens and clicks
- Automatically adds Google Analytics tracking data to your URLs
- Has pretty, visual reports of your email results
- Allows you to tag your messages and see your stats filtered by tag
- Integrates with MailChimp’s templating system, letting you export your MailChimp templates to Mandrill and use them in your transactional emails
Usage limitations are based on sending volume: with a free account it’s free to use Mandrill up to 12,000 emails per month, but with a paid account it depends. The Mandrill signup page will allow you to calculate the cost of the service.
The post at the MailChimp blog notes that the Mandrill service is not finished yet, but did show a preview of a mobile app which allows you to track sending volume, reputation and deliverability:
Read more on the Mandrill service in the announcement post here.
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