Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) vs. SMTP2GO vs. SparkPost (discontinued)

Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs

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It's great for any application that you need to track email receipt and recipient interaction, or with devices/programs that don't fare well with Exchange based email services. Don't try to set SMTP2GO as your outbound email server if you're using O365, that just isn't a possibility (not that I've looked into that setup).

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Our early experiences with SparkPost were great; we were looking for a low-cost (or no-cost) solution to our email messaging needs, and SparkPost had the best low-cost option: 100,000 messages per month for free, guaranteed for life. Even though our team has experience with other APIs, we chose SparkPost because it felt like the best value. Our experience with it was great. Two years ago, they discontinued their free option but sent the existing users the following message: "When you signed up, we promised that if we ever changed the terms of our 100K free plan, we would continue to honor the original plan for the life of the account. I would like to reaffirm this promise: while this plan is no longer available to new customers, you are grandfathered into this level of free sending volume." The following year, apparently following a change in leadership, they decided to "deprecate" existing free plans, dropping us down from 100,000 messages per month to 500, the lowest of any email API service I'm aware of. No recognition of the broken promise, the reneged guarantee, just a 20% off coupon. This atrocious behavior that reeks of a new culture of squeezing as much money as possible out of its users and has coincided with a steady deterioration of functionality and customer service. At this point, I have no idea why anyone would pay more for a worse service that treats its users so poorly when you could use SendGrid or a similar competitor for a lower price and way more features.

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• Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
• Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
• Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.

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• adding senders or domains to improve email deliverability
• you don't have to deal with RBL to white list an IP address previously used for spaming
• Control panel gives you enough flexibility without a cluttered UI
• Everything you need is well documented
• The API is easy to use offers you the ability to integrate SMTP2Go with virtually anything

• When you don't want to spent time writing your own code to send emails from your apps
• When you're looking for a product which provides all that you need regarding email features to make it part of your software
• When you want to use a product which includes templates that can be re-used instead of writing your own and all the required effort to do that

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• The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
• Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
• No free tier.

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• Might be nice to add a monthly good looking PDF report for subaccount users that can be branded and sent directly to the subaccount contact. A 'client facing' report that we can use to show our customers the email usage history.

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• When I first implemented SparkPost, I did not take advantage of the sub-account feature, and my account was suspended on New Year's Eve. It took two days until I could speak with a support representative to get my account re-activated. I am now using sub-accounts to alleviate the underlying problem, but I was disappointed that my account was suspended by an automated system with no notice.

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Reliability in email delivery is what counts the most. SMTP2GO is undeniably a winner in this category. The price is reasonable, therefore the RoI is excellent.

It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.

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While reporting could use some tweaks overall it is a very good product that works reliably and is simple to set up and maintain.

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I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.

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When I first contacted SMTP2GO while searching for a solution, they were extremely helpful and attentive. I think it only took two email messages to answer all my questions and make a decision. I don't think I've ever needed any support to implement and operate the several solutions I currently use with the SMTP2GO service. It just works intuitively and flawlessly.

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Would give it a zero if I could. Their customer service used to be incredible; fast response times, really hands-on with their users, and a pretty regular feedback process. They sent me an awesome t-shirt that became part of my go-to climbing gear. But for the past year, their response times went way down, their customer service was less helpful and generally a lot more rude, and they haven't asked for customer input once since their leadership change

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So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough

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It has been so long since I did my comparison with other products that no comparison would be valid today. It has worked so well at a price point that is so acceptable that I don't feel an urge to do the evaluation again.

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Mailchimp and sendgrid are giving good services and good customer support 24/7 and ROI is increased with this as transition is very smooth. SparkPost is very expensive and not good as much as we think and they will least worried about your mails, tickets, call and messages. Highly not recommended this SparkPost to any one

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• It helped us to grow our customer database substantially in the last quarter.
• Last week we reached 62% customer engagement in our campaign. This is very good customer engagement for our projects.
• In the last quarter we achieved our target by 135%.

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• Allowed us to use the same SMTP information across the board for all customers instead of having them split between several accounts.
• More cost efficient than paying for several different email accounts.
• Created an additional layer of great customer service for us since SMTP information is able to be preprogrammed into the equipment before ever leaving our facility.

• It has helped us with our IP health and making sure that we avoid spam traps
• Very high deliverability and automatic retrying once they have the event

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