Mandrill Changes, Requires Mailchimp
February 25th, 2016
Mailchimp, the parent company of Mandrill has made an announcement.
In short, Mandrill will no longer be a separate product. It will be dedicated as a paid addon to Mailchimp and will require a Mailchimp account in order to be used.
Mandrill users have until the 16th of March 2016 to create their Mandrill accounts or find another service.
Read the announcement: Important Changes to Mandrill
Which Way To Go?
This can be both good and bad for Mailchimp, it all depends on the details of this announcement.
So many users use Mandrill with 3rd party applications including integrations such as sending emails through WordPress, directly from their servers, etc. If these 3rd party integrations are cut off completely, it may be problematic for Mailchimp in my personal opinion.
If the announcement specifically refers to the merging of the two services and that a Mailchimp account will be required but that the Mandrill API will still be available to be used then the story is different.
Recommended Alternatives
If you want to move over to a different service, here are the best alternatives:
See our SMTP Relay Services documentation for instructions on setting up with our WordPress Newsletter plugin.
User Recommendations
Some additional SMTP/API relay providers recommended by our users:
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Comments
Can we integrate Sparkpost with the Newsletter Plugin?
Hi Kiran, thank you for your comment. Yes, we are currently working on the SparkPost API in our WordPress Newsletter plugin and it will be out shortly. In the meanwhile, you can already use SparkPost with the plugin using it’s SMTP settings: https://support.sparkpost.com/customer/portal/articles/1929887-sending-your-first-email#send-email-via-smtp
You left SparkPost off the list. They are SMTP relay and API friendly. Easy to make the switch. Cheaper. And have the best inbox placement than any other email service. Check ’em out: http://bit.ly/ExpressTier or check out their Dev Hub https://developers.sparkpost.com
Thank you for the recommendation.
We’ll create an additional list of SMTP/API relay services suggested here in the comments.
Awesome. Also on Feb 29, in an update on Mandrill’s original blog announcement, “SparkPost has offered to honor Mandrill pricing for all customers.” In addition, they’re also offering 100K emails/mo for free. They have outstanding APIs and documentation. And their CEO gave a promise to developers today that he’s all in and will stand behind the 100K free emails/mo for the lifetime of your SparkPost account. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-sparkpost-pricing