A company I am developing for needs an email service provider where its own non-technical design staff can create an email template using the provider's design web interface. Transactional emails are to be sent to a single recipient specifying the stored template plus insert values.
This is currently being done using MadMimi, and the company wants to also use a second provider for backup.
I have examined the SendGrid documentation, but apparently its web design tool produces templates which can be used only for email sent to lists, not to individual recipients.
(Note: I am coding in Ruby on Rails, but that is irrelevant to this issue.)
Can anyone suggest alternative providers which fit the requirements? Thanks!
In fact, SendGrid's Transactional Template engine allows non-technical people to edit emails meant to be sent to individual people. More can be found on SendGrid's product page and documentation pages.
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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.
Ok i currently send information to my customers through my magento website. I'm curious to know what the difference is between sending emails through my website's server and using a service like mailchimp or mandrill?
Mailchimp has a lot of list management features for the admins such as sub-dividing your list into the most responsive vs least responsive subscribers so you can tailor your message to each (for example), MailChimp has your campaign analytics built into their dashboard, they have fully implemented sign-up buttons for your website, automatically sent subscription confirmation emails, and subscription management forms for the users to decide which lists they want to be on. These are just a few benefits.
Basically:
You could do all that with Magento and Google Analytics and a bunch of custom backend code, but it would be a huuuge amount of work. Then again it all depends on how much you intend on focusing on email marketing. If you're sending a newsletter to a small list, then you're probably fine with sending emails from Magento.
We are looking for an email API service that allows us to send emails to specific users (not just list by list but user-by-user). Usually that would be considered transactional email and you would use an API like Sendgrid or Mandrill for it.
However, we have been using the Mailchimp service so far and we really like its dashboard and what it allows you to do from subscribing users manually, to sorting and searching, etc. We also like how Mailchimp handles unsubscribes, subscription confirmation, and preference updating of subscribers.
is there any API service that combines the two?
SendGrid actually has all of the features that you mentioned in your question. We have a dashboard that will allow you to:
Subscribe users manually
Sort and search through your list of users
Handle unsubscribing
We don't force you to opt people in (subscription confirmation), but that would be super easy to build if you really wanted it.
More details about all of this on our website and in our documentation. You can also contact our support team (which is available 24/7 by phone, email, and chat)
For an application we are building, it is required to give certain registered accounts the ability to send emails to other registered accounts.
As part of the registration, we obviously collect the real email address of every user.
I do not want to expose any of my users' email addresses so I would like to have the ability to proxy them through fake email address that basically forward to the real email address.
For example, if someone want's to email John Doe, they would send an email to abcdefg12345#mysite.com which would then forward the email to john#johndoe.com.
In case its not obvious, the purpose of this is to protect the end user from spam and keeps their real email address private. Since my application acts as the proxy, I could easily block certain email's from going through.
The most famous example of this is Facebook's email proxy for Facebook Apps.
My Question: Are there any patterns, servers, 3rd party services, or libraries that provide such a feature? Does anyone have any suggestions for how this could be built?
I've never seen a service that offers this directly. The hardest part here is the receiving of the emails and wiring things up to your app for the authentication. You could use a service like http://cloudmailin.com in order to receive the email and then forward it on or even use some sort of custom install. Another option would be to create a script that modifies a server such as postfix's configuration.
Finally although I wouldn't recommend it you could try and create your own mail server to do this. I would read up a little more on SMTP/IMAP and see what options you have.
It looks like there is no 3rd party service or tool\library to accomplish this. It is going to be a bigger task than I was hoping for so I will be putting it off until I have the time to implement it.
I think the solution is to use a mail daemon that has an API or at least allows you to manipulate the users\emails\aliases in it such that you can create new mailboxes on demand and set them to forward from someuser#proxy.mysite.com to user#theirdomain.com
I found out that there are services that provide this type of functionality as part of their offerings:
http://mailgun.net/
http://www.sendgrid.com
Both of these services are very cool and offer quite a bit for sending and analyzing emails including the ability to create forwarding\proxy emails.
I have an application that sends emails when a user creates/modifies a record. I would like my users to be able to reply to the email that was sent to them and have the web application receive the email, parse it and update the record automatically. I have seen this done in web apps like Basecamp. The email usually says "Reply above this line", and if you simply reply to the email, you don't have to log in to the web application in order to update your ticket/conversation.
How can I go about implementing this sort of functionaly? (I'm not looking for a particular language implementation, but rather a language agnostic solution).
There are 2 ways you can do this:
You could use a Procmail filter to pipe the incoming email to your script. This would need some 'nix knowhow to setup - but it's certainly possible to do what you described via this method.
Use a service like MailGun - they do all the hard work of setting up and configuring the mail server stuff and expose it to you via a nice programmable web API. I've been evaluating it this week to solve a similar problem like the one you are having and I can tell you: it is really cool and I highly recommend you check it out yourself.
You'll need to implement a service/daemon that polls an email inbox for new messages. To relate an incoming email to the corresponding data, you can include an id in the outgoing email's subject.
I agree you should created a system to receive the incoming email but I don't necessarily agree that polling for it is the correct solution. Take a look at a blog post I wrote on the subject here. It relates to Rails but the concepts should work in any language. That's why we wrote the CloudMailin system to provide a better way of receiving the email.
Also you can use a unique from address for each email that would prevent the user from altering the subject line being a problem. The disposable part of an email address is useful for that. reply+user123#example.com for example.