I’m looking for a E-Mail tool to fit my needs. Right now we use Mandrill for transactional E-Mails and Mailchimp for Newsletters. We would love to cover the Automated E-Mails also with Mailchimp, but the tools are quite limited (see our requirements in 2.).
My gut feeling says, there is no [single] tool to cover my needs, but before I spend months developing a stable tool which handles all of my needs, I thought I would reach out to you.
Here are my needs:
Transactional E-Mails:
We want to use it to send transactional emails. Depending on [the category of] what the customer bought, the context of the email will be different (e.g. other images, texts). There will be up to 20 different categories.
Automated E-Mails:
We want to send an E-Mail to a customer for his birthday or before an ordered product arrives. As our products usually take between 1 month and 1 year to deliver, we also want to send an E-Mail, enriched with detailed information about the product, 1 month and also 1 day in prior. Now the important part: Some customers have up to 3 outstanding deliveries per year.
In a perfect world, all this timings and the templates can be edited by our marketing personnel, not just by a developer.
Newsletter E-Mails:
Each customer and/or customer group should become a personalised newsletter. Therefor the newsletter tool has to be fed with data about the customer from our systems/Salesforce.
All customer specific data is in Salesforce. Therefor the ideal mail system has a good Salesforce integration.
Do you know of any product[s] like this? What would you use?
Thank you!
At Stack Overflow, our needs are similar. We send a bunch of triggered transactional emails, automated "drip" emails, and digest newsletters. Until recently, we sent everything through our own codebase using homegrown tools, but we're in the process of transitioning over to SendGrid. We also looked at Mail Gun and Send With Us, but SendGrid seemed like the best fit and we hope to send everything through one ESP.
We don't use Salesforce, so I can't comment on that.
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My questions is regarding with MIMEDefang and I tried to reach their public mail list but after 1 week nobody accepted my join request. Also, I've already asked similar question to their mail list and i got no answer yet.
I'm trying to change the behavior of our Postfix mail server which is used for e-mail delivery to the customers. It doesn't accept any e-mails from the internet. A couple of weeks ago, the government decided to change mail delivery options for all banking industries. Basically the government add some some basic rules regarding with "gdpr" which should be applied for all outgoing mails to the banking customers. There is an options list to state customers desires about what kind of e-mails allowed to deliver their personal mail accounts. The mails could be 3 or 4 different types. For example, bills for payments, campaign mails, sending and receiving money receipts and so on. The policy says, if a customer specifically states that any of these mail types could send him, we can process it according his/her preferences. On the contrary, if a customer receives any mail other than its preferences the bank will face penalties for that behavior. I decided to use MIMEDefang to achieve this policy. The requirements listed above, drive me to use sql or redis service along with MIMEDefang because this list could change in time. I guess right on the "filter_recipient" time, I have to connect sql db to check whether the user allowed this mail to deliver its personal mail account. Is it possible to use sql (postgresql, mariadb,) with MIMEDefang ? I'm not certain about which callback is the right choice here to query that. May be "filter_end" is better than "filter_recipient" callback for this particular check because there is another condition which needs to check/determine the type of e-mail.
The second condition is the type of e-mail. I have to look at the contents in the DATA portion of e-mail and find out the type of e-mail. I'm going to tie these two conditions and decide to allow or drop e-mails individually. Also, there are 90K customers and we were delivered 30K mails per day at most.
I would like to ask some questions about SQL and MIMEDefang.
Is that possible to use SQL queries with MIMEDefang to validate recipients and its preferences ?
Is there any drawbacks while using SQL services with MIMEDefang ?
Where can i tie these conditions with each other ? Which callback is eligible to process these two conditions together ?
I am working on creating a system that requires me to differentiate a email that is sent by a real person or a automated bot.
I used gmail-api and got pretty sure that all emails under "Personal" label would have all the real life people emails, including important automated ones. Now how do I differentiate from there?
Tricky problem probably not solvable using the view of one mailbox content. If working across a large organisation where access and reading of all inbound email is implemented some sort of categorisation may be possible. Using the toolbox of spam filtering technology, Bayes filtering on keywords, urls, pictures etc. it might be possible to categorise email in to personal / work / commercial / bulk spam / transaction receipts. Check all other message headers as part of the email context.
Can you do the differentiate task by hand ? Automate how you did that.
If company already subscribed to MailChimp do they need also Mandril to send transactional emails such as app welcome, invites to join or befriend, password recovery etc.
Can one send password recovery or welcome email as one person campaign programmatically using MailChimp alone? Or is it too expensive or too cumbersome?
I've been using Mailchimp for a while and what you are seeking can be partially managed with a featured called automation within Mailchimp. It allows you to:
Set up any number of emails as chained emails (so to say) which are triggered individually when something happens within the Mailchimp list. For example if someone joins your list, it triggers a welcome message. This automation requires in some cases no code and can be done relatively easy. You can see more automation examples here (of course you can use their API for more cool stuff).
For password changes notifications, email verifications and such transactional emails you could use Mandrill, but as an add-on within Mailchimp which has a separate pricing, where you can start free for the first 2000 emails.
I believe the automation on Mailchimp + a good use of their API to make changes on the list, could easily be put to good use to your advantage (haven't tried this combination yet but will do in the future, let me know if you find out something).
To answer more directly your question, yes, you can achieve a certain degree of automation with the automation part of Mailchimp (which is relatively new), but for a more granular control you definitely could use Mandrill as an add-on within Mailchimp.
Techically, you could create single person campaigns via the Mailchimp API.
But, Mailchimp has developed it's own anti-spam AI (Omnivore) that kicks in every time the campaign is ready to be sent, which analyzes the campaign and list data.
Since I had Omnivore block some of my campaigns for trivial reasons, I think it would be a matter of time before it finds a pattern in your workaround.
Can someone help me understand what SendGrid actually adds to an application architecture? Is it's role really as limited as being an alternative delivery engine (SMTP) and post-send analytics? I was hoping that it would do more for transactional email, but everything that I see/read indicates that this is the limit.
My primary use case is for transactional email (new registrations, contact requests, etc.). I'd really like to hear how others have deployed SendGrid within the context of their own web applications. Your experiences may help me better understand how I can best deploy it within my own.
Thanks.
I implemented SendGrid at my last job, and shortly after left that job to go work at SendGrid. At the time, I simply set it up as an SMTP relay, and it took less than 5 minutes.
Scott's answer nailed it, though. We do a lot more than transactional messaging though. We have a newsletter product that you can plug into. A common use case is when a user registers on your site, you send them a transactional Email and fire off an API call to us to add them to one or more mailing lists based on their opt-in preferences. Then, whenever you want to send an Email to your users, you send us a single message via API with the name of the list, and we take care of delivering it on your behalf. We also help with unsubscribes -- eg. if a user unsubscribes from any message, we can use that event to trigger a call back to your site so you can handle anything on your end as well like un-selecting an opt-in checkbox the next time they view their user profile. I know several small businesses run by friends who do this exactly, including my last job who set this up after I left that company.
Another common setup is having one IP address for your transactional Email, and another IP for newsletters. This way if users flag a newsletter as spam (because they're too lazy to click an unsubscribe link, for example), it won't hurt the reputation of the transactional Emails getting through.
Don't hesitate to contact us with questions. We love to help!
If your primary use case is for transactional email, then SendGrid is the right solution for you. It is essentially a drop in replacement for your SMTP, but will scale way better than you could building something yourself from the ground up. It takes time to setup your own SMTP and time to make sure it's not falling over and sending out emails that never get to their destination.
All SendGrid does is email, so all the heavy lifting and boilerplate tedious setup is done for you. You mention transactional email, that is SendGrid's sweet spot. They make sure email gets where it's supposed to go. The big bonus is they give you a lot of tracking goodies along with making sure your email gets where it's supposed to go. There are a number of large companies that said the 15 minutes they spent switching to SendGrid upped their delivery rates substantially.
Unless you love running an SMTP server, instead of building your own product, I'd highly recommend offloading delivery to someone else.
I have a large user list which is distributed in two groups. 1. Phplist 2. Vbulletin
Phplist has around 50,000 users while vbulletin has some 70,000 users. These all are double optin safe lists and completely legal.
We have a dedicated server and use phplist tos end mails but a single mails takes 3 days to process given phplist limitations. I am very keen to use Sendgrid / Amazaon SES or something so that i can shoot pur monthly newsletters much faster ( we have some 20 news letters including jobs, announcements login etc).
At present we send emailes from a different domain than the main one and its like www.mydomainnewsletter.com while main site and corporate emails are www.mydomain.com ( my main site is on drupal)
Now how do I build a process where all transaction and corporate mails go from mydomain.com while all newsletters go from mydomainnewsletters.com. users shall subscribe and unsubscribe at mydomain.com and this email list shall be synchronized with www.mydomainnewsletter.com.
My server has qmail intalled. So can somebody guide me through the process. I am not techie at all.
You have a few options, that I can think of. I definitely don't think you should do this in-house unless you want to deal with the huge mess of dealing with deliverability.
Here are some non-in-house options:
Build a scheduler, server side, to shoot out the emails to third party providers like SendGrid and Amazon SES, or make bulk email API calls using PostageApp
Use a service built for newsletters, like MailChimp, which can manage your lists for you and send out bulk emails without any problems whatsoever.
At least with these services, you're looking at a much faster delivery time. (Three days is attrocious.) They have the resources to send these emails, they worry about the deliverability, and you can focus on making an awesome newsletter and/or working on your website.
Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.