TOPIC: Mandrill changes

I just received a mail from mandrill to say that my free mandrill account will close next month unless I sign up with mailchimp for a paid account. Apparently they're merging mandrill as a mailchimp add-on. I only use the free mandrill api for transactional mail only, so was wondering if this will continue to work - I don't need email marketing etc. so mailchimp seems a bit of overkill for my needs.
If I can't use mandrill, then I will have to use Joomla's built in smtp sending - which most of the time doesn't work, as some of the mail gets labelled as junk, sent from my own domain to yahoo, gmail etc.
Is anyone else in this situation also ?

I was about to post something similar.

Am kind of hoping CompoJoom might look at building something similar for Send Grid.

sendgrid.com/marketing/mandrill-alternat...pr.TW.AMS&cvo_cid=pr

I only need smtp for transactional mail - which isn't a lot. I already use a free Sendgrid account on another Joomla site, which is quite simple to set up- by entering your Sendgrid account settings into Global Config / server/ mail settings for your smtp host.. it works ok for my needs.

I would prefer to carry on using Mandrill on my other domain, but it's going to be impossible now that it will need a paid Mailchimp account to work, so it looks like I'll need another free Sendgrid account.

I agree though.. a new CJ extension ie. CSendgrid or whatever would be great

Hey guys,
I'm Looking into alternatives.
CMandrill will continue to work for those of you who have a paid mandrill account. But looking at their new pricing I understand that it wouldn't fit most of us.
We'll figure something out.

Regards,
Daniel

Thx Daniel

We use smtp only for the sending of forum and message notifications and form sending. This amounts to probably less than 100 sends per month for us (registered users on a gaming clan). So having to pay for a Mailchimp account to use Mandrill just isn't practical for that small amount of sends. Problem is, If we don't use an external smtp service then we have gmail and yahoo users who won't receive notifications.

Hopefully we can all find a good alternative soon, before the Mandrill cutoff date this month.

I know and I completely understand. I'm not working for mandrill, so I can't tell you why they decided to do what they did. I find it stupid, but that is life...

Just to confirm, will Compojoom's CMandrill continue to support Mailchimp in the foreseeable future?

I contacted MailChimp today and they told me that it would be a minimum of $30 per month to keep my Mandrill working. $10 for MailChimp & $20 for Mandrill. They recommended I use Sparkpost. Is it possible to create a plugin using this? They offer free emails up to 100,000 per month. Even if you made a paid plugin I would be willing to purchase.

I'm currently also using sparkpost via smtp. It works, but I had to speak with our hosting company to unblock 587 for smtp. If we had an API integration this wouldn't be an issue...

I spoke with sparkpost about financing a joomla component, but they are not interested. Will need to come up with a way to finance the development of such component.

Regards,
Daniel

This may be of help to other previous Mandrill users like myself. I switched over to a free account from ElasticEmail .. so far it's worked great and works similar to Sendgrid. There is also a free Joomla component available that allows the input of an API key. Their support are also very helpful - just ensure that you set up your spf records correctly to avoid any mail spoofing.. lots of info on their website to help with setting up DKIM, DMARC + tracking API too.