Hey Adam,
Highly recommended by Nicholas - I hope that it will meet your expectations then

I don't know how RSMail is written, that's why without testing it with CMandrill I won't be able to tell you what the result would be.
There are 2 ways to use the mandrill service. One is smtp and the other one is the API.
Using smtp is the easiest option - just provide the smtp server in joomla's config and you are ready to roll!
The next option to use Mandrill with Joomal is - cmandrill. What we do is - we override the standard JMail class in Joomla. This way all extensions that use JMail to send their mails will use our class and we will send the mail through the API.
Sending the mails through the API normally has benefits such as speed + you can tag your content etc.

Now back to RSMail -> if they use the standard JMail class - you can use it with CMandrill. If they don't, they most probably have a configuration for smtp (or they use the global options in Joomla) you can go for mandrill through smtp.

With that said - mandrill also has limitations when you start for the first time. AT the beginning you cannot send a lot of e-mails, but with the time when you get some positive reputations the limit goes up.

If you go over the limit - the mails are queued and they will be delivered a little later.
With that said I love mandrill and right now I cannot think of a reason to use a different service. Our mails get delivered faster than the mails that people get from paypal on purchase (although they are sent few seconds later when the APN call comes to our server). And since I use it - the number of e-mails I get about a non-delivered e-mail has gone way down. And even if I get such an e-mail - I just check the stats in mandrill and can see if the mail was sent or not...

Hope this information helps!
Cheers,
Daniel

P.S. We will be releasing a new CMandrill version begining of May. If you use the CMandrill on joomla 3.4 make sure that error reporting is set to none in your global config (there is a notice that gets triggered on j3.4 - nothing critical!)

Daniel - many thanks for (all) that!

I've been able to get CMandrill working OK on a basic Joomla site (no real components added), using the API method. Just simple admin mass mail stuff. I copied my RSMail newsletter HTML template from a live site and it worked perfectly *(lots of inline CSS images and styles) - albeit without any dynamic Joomla content as it was just styled headers/footers - but that was *very* encouraging!

As soon as I have some more raw/test data, I can compare the reporting that's available from Mandrill with what RSMail offers. That particular client has never used Mailchimp style reporting, so isn't too familiar with what's out there.

Any more info about the queueing method? "A little later" can mean lots of things :lol:!

I'd like to know how to get "positive reputations" ... who do I bribe? Is it related to "Karma" in the forums, I wonder?

Thanks for the note about error reporting - I've just tweaked that so I'm all set for 3.4

Regards,

Adam.

EDIT: Found the "reputation" info: http://help.mandrill.com/forums/22011078-Quota-and-Reputation-System?_ga=1.167300988.318340753.1429971575

Sure sign of incipient madness ... replying to my own posts!

Great news! I did a test to a small number of recipients from RSMail, with Component set to "Global" to trap the Class and Function values. Emails got sent with no problem - and all the links acquired Mandrill parameters. Checking my reports, it appears the values returned are: class_rsmailHelper and function_sendMail (rsmailHelper and sendMail).

The only thing I had in the Mandrill template HTML was <div mc:edit="main_content"></div> - as RSMail streams out the Joomla content with its own layout (as created by you).

So ... for anyone that's interested - CMandrill and RSMail work like a charm! Almost no setting up to do at all. FANTASTIC!

Adam.

Cool! Glad to hear this! That's the way it's supposed to work when all developers use the same APIs and don't do their own crazy s**t

Cheers,
Daniel