Mandrill/Mailchimp are merging. How does this fit in with Mandrill's Acceptable Use policy?

[herbdool]

I just got an email that Mandrill and Mailchimp are merging their services and Mandrill is going to be a paid add-on of Mailchimp. http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/

I also noticed for the first time that using Mandrill for bulk emails is not considered acceptable use. How does that affect this extension, especially the more recent addition of support for CiviMail?

[herbdool]

In terms of big corporate email platforms it seems that Mailchimp/Mandrill is being a lot more restrictive compared to SendGrid https://sendgrid.com/email-solutions which allows both transactional and bulk emails (can't think of any others at the moment).

[danielstrum]

Hi Joe,
I am also concerned/curious about this. Perhaps a few users of this extension can chip in and sponsor a re-write to use another service. I have had a good experiences with RackSpace's service, MailGun.

[JoeMurray]

It seems like a corporate pivot on MailChimp's part, since they paid us last year to add the bulk email support to the extension. There are several other email services with a variety of pros and cons that have integrations with CiviCRM, but I'm unclear how many of them are integrated with CiviCRM for transactional emails in terms of support for marking emails as bounced, for example.

@danielstrum Thanks for that suggestion. I will investigate soon, and will be putting up a blog post on civicrm.org later today I expect.

[herbdool]

Interesting, so if MailChimp paid for this perhaps it's worth talking to them if this extension will still be tolerated or if they're going to clamp down.

I'm sure this would be a lot of work, but might be worth abstracting the extension so it could support a handful of similar services. But then why not just get it into core?

[yepher]

In case you need it here is the Mandril migration to SparkPost guide.

There is a Slack channel if you would like to discuss if this is a good fit or not:
http://slack.sparkpost.com

[danielstrum]

Hi @JoeMurray

I'm wondering if you have looked into re-writing a version of this extension for use with another service. Perhaps SparkPost would be a good option and willing to chip-in as it seems they are trying to grab Mandrill customers. Again, at least one of my clients would also chip in.

Best,
ds

[herbdool]

Seems that some developers have already started a SparkPost extension: https://github.com/proexchange/com.pesc.sparkpost @danielstrum