Moving from Mandrill
Tips
by Giedrius Rimkus
PlateCulture sends transactional emails through services like Mandrill. This document discusses PlateCulture moving their transactional email service from Mandrill to SendGrid after Mandrill required a Mailchimp account. It provides tips for supporting both services during a transition and ensuring a smooth migration to SendGrid to maintain email functionality.
3. 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]"
4. Our choice is was Mandrill
PlateCulture + Mandrill = happy users
6. 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.
7. Time given to move
Parse (Facebook) - SaaS: ~1 year
ShellyCloud - PaaS: ~6 months
8. 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.
13. Tips
Support both providers using WebHooks and Inbound Parsing for a
while if you dont want to lose data. This means creating new DNS
records with different subdomains.
14. 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.
15. Tips
Enable Open Tracking & Click Tracking configuration for web hooks to
work properly.
Dont forget to subscribe to a SendGrid paid plan if you were sending
more than 12k emails per month with Mandrill.
16. Tips
It is always a good idea to deploy your app to a staging environment
and test the email functionality there before going live.