Tips moving from Mandrill

Here I talk about some tips on how to move from Mandrill to SendGrid.

Transcript

1. Moving from Mandrill Tips by Giedrius Rimkus
2. PlateCulture Connects people who love cooking & hosting dinners with people who love eating authentic home cooked meals
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]" • monthly invoices
4. Our choice is was Mandrill PlateCulture + Mandrill = happy users
5. Potential risks Service is offline Acquisitions & shutdowns Others
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.
9. Alternatives • SendGrid • Mailgun • MailJet • Postmarkapp • others..
10. Our requirements • Tags • Inbound parsing • WebHooks • Custom Metadata
11. SendGrid Passed all the requirements plus had much more to offer
12. Terminology SendGrid Mandrill categories tags unique_args metadata X-SMTPAPI X-MC-*
13. 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.
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. • Don’t 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.
17. Thank you Questions? Giedrius Rimkus Software Developer @PlateCulture