cmorrisrsg

13 anni fadiscuss

Lead engineer at MailChimp here. Funny you should mention it, but tomorrow we're going to be launching Google Authenticator and YubiKey integrations with AlterEgo so you can use those as you like. We're also working on a Duo integration, but no ETA there.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

We saw it pop up on Centos6 as well. JRE 1.6 and 1.7.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

We saw this on every Ubuntu Lucid machine we run. Restarting the JVM was insufficient - we ended up fully rebooting the machines.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

Yes - the pricing is flat rate. Right now charging for inbound emails is turned off since the feature is so new and basic, but inbound emails will be indexed and tracked the same as outbound emails, so they'll be charged the same.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

Well, supporting unsubscribes in transactional emails can sometimes make sense, like with notification or confirmation emails where the user might want the option to not receive them. With others, like receipts or signup confirmations it makes less sense. For now, we presume that you're going to do the right thing and implement unsubscribes if it makes sense for the emails you're sending. We've got a feature coming to make that process easier, but it's still going to be a decision that the sender is going to need to make.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

It's really simple right now. We add a List-Unsubscribe header to each email which in supporting email clients (like gmail) adds an unsubscribe button to the report spam button that's always there. If the recipient unsubscribes in that way, we treat it as an unsubscribe. The more traditional subscription model isn't supported by Mandrill at this time. You'd need to build your own or use MailChimp for that. I recommend MailChimp, it's pretty good at handling subscription-based email like that ;)

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

We've considered it, but we're still working on our reseller/integrator story.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

You can customize DKIM without a dedicated IP. You do need to have a paid plan to get the dedicated IP, but that's really because you need at least a few hundred thousand emails per month of volume before getting a dedicated IP. With lower volumes (like anything that can fit in the free plan), the sending reputation of one of our shared IP addresses is certainly better than a dedicated IP with no reputation.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

Yes - you can use Mandrill for newsletters if you want to code your own subscription logic and store your own list of emails. MailChimp is quite a bit more expensive than Mandrill, but it does a lot more too. MailChimp stores more analytics than Mandrill does and stores it longer. It handles scheduling, batch testing, social integrations and content management in ways that Mandrill really doesn't. MailChimp also has analytics and profiles for list subscribers that Mandrill doesn't have.

If Mandrill does everything you need it to do and you can do the rest on your own, you should use Mandrill. It is, as you note, much cheaper.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

Not yet. The inbound system right now is really basic - we'll parse out the messages and deliver them to a webhook, but we won't munge it much beyond breaking apart attachments and things.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

There are a few things that we think set Mandrill apart from the pack. Our application is designed with responsiveness in mind, and we have mobile application on both of the major platforms so you can get access to your email stats and reputation wherever you are. We have search and analytics deeply ingrained in the application in a way that is fairly unique - letting you see your emails in context and trying to derive the context for you when we can. We also integrate deeply with the main MailChimp product. They use the same underlying delivery engine, the same templating and content personalization systems, and we have a heavy discount for users of both products.

Mandrill's still a rapidly iterating product for us, but we think we can take the same sense of usability and power that we have in MailChimp and extend it to email more broadly.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

We're trying to make Mandrill a stable email platform for all uses, so in that way we're similar to SendGrid. Where we're really trying to focus isn't so much in just the delivery of the email, though we do have a ton of experience doing that well.

Mandrill is a product that is trying to make your application-driven emails as easily tracked, tested, and understood as the bulk email you'd send using MailChimp. It's still early days for the product and we're still iterating rapidly, but that's where we're trying to get.

We're also integrated with MailChimp itself. We've got a big discount for paid MailChimp users that want to use Mandrill, and you can share templates between Mandrill and MailChimp easily. We'll be integrating more deeply in the future - really trying to make a one-stop shop for email-related needs for businesses.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

That's one of the reasons we chose that name for the brand. Since Mandrill is an infrastructure service, we wanted it to feel more serious and aggressive than MailChimp.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

We built on top of our own internal job scheduling systems that we use for email to handle retries, batching, and concurrency handling so we don't overwhelm your servers. It's all custom stuff, though.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

You do get all the information we have on the message and the bounce. Recipient, sender, subject line, bounce info, tags, etc.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

Hey - I'm Chad, the project lead for Mandrill. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys might have.

cmorrisrsg

14 anni fadiscuss

A viable solution going forward is to have browsers implement both the vendor-prefixed and non-vendor-prefixed versions of a property, but use the vendor-prefixed one preferentially. That would allow developers to use one non-prefixed rule in the common case where all supporting browsers implement the rule in the same way, but developers can target particular browsers if they deviate. Or if you're worried about the standard deviating, support vendor-rule and x-rule at the same time.

For the current webkit- mess, it's probably best to just have the vendors implement each others prefixes on a case-by-case basis (when you know the semantics are the same). There are way fewer browser vendors than there are website developers, and it's much easier to get them all in a room to agree on something.

cmorrisrsg

15 anni fadiscuss

This is only hypocritical if when Stallman says "phone", he always means "cell phone". Just to be a devil's advocate, he could be talking about a landline which generally doesn't track movement, doesn't run software, and doesn't get turned into a listening device.

cmorrisrsg

15 anni fadiscuss

Any coding problem that could feasibly be completed in an acceptable amount of time would be too small to actually tell me what I want to know. I mostly don't want to know what algorithms you're aware of or how quickly you can type. I want to know how you structure and modularize code. I want to know how you debug things. I want to know if you can refactor well. In short, I want to know about how you handle building and maintaining real software. If I hired people to do coding problems all day, that would be another thing, but I don't.

cmorrisrsg

15 anni fadiscuss

I actually reject people without pet projects for an entirely different reason. I can find out much more about how you behave as a developer and whether or not you'd fit in with our company by reading your code than I can from any kind of interview or whiteboard challenge. Ideally you'd actually hire the prospective developer for a short contract project before hiring, but that has significant challenges and costs as well.

Think of a carpenter that claimed to be amazing at producing furniture, but had none to show you. Would you trust them on how well he could BS you in an interview? It's not about passion or dedication. If you, producer of code, can show me code you've produce, I'm taking a much lower risk on hiring you. And fortunately, there are enough people around with code to show that rejecting others is a pretty easy filtering decision to make.

comments