Using Mandrill as an SMTP server

[musicscotland]

We've had success recently with using the (relatively new) transactional email web application Mandrill as an SMTP server. We turned to this because it wasn't possible to configure Google Apps Gmail as the SMTP server in SellerDeck, due to the SSL connection needed for Apps which SellerDeck doesn't support.

Once you have a Mandrill account and API key, you can plug those details into SellerDeck's (or Actinic's) three SMTP settings. All of your customer order confirmation and other SellerDeck-generated emails will be logged in Mandrill, with nice graphs and reports including exportable numbers for opens and clicks (for HTML emails) and deliverability % (delivered, rejected, spam reported, hard/soft bounces). There's other functionality including tags and templates which I haven't explored yet.

A big draw is that it's currently free up to 25,000 messages per month.

So if you're having trouble configuring your 'localhost' mail server, or using Google Apps for Gmail, it's well worth a try. The only modification you may need to make in SellerDeck is to change the SMTP port in ACTINIC.pm. Our account used a different port from the SellerDeck default of 25.

PS I don't work for Mandrill and there's no affiliate benefit here...

[Mike Hughes]

Mandrill seems to be part of mailchimp and their website says the first 12,000 emails are free. The feature list says you can also create a custom spf which could be useful for getting emails delivered.

Definitely something to keep in mind for any smtp problems.

Mike

[PatchworkRabbit]

This worked a treat, thanks!

[musicscotland]

Mandrill moving to paid MailChimp account

Just a follow-up that from March 16th 2016, the free Mandrill SMTP sending service is moving to MailChimp and users will need a monthly paid MailChimp account. Fine if you have that budget, but monthly mailing costs can run into £100s for larger lists.

Our localhost setting works OK these days, but I tried Amazon's SES (Simple Email Sending) service out of interest. Can confirm it doesn't work with SellerDeck as TLS security is required (formerly SSL), which SellerDeck doesn't support - the Network Settings : Test fails with:

message: 530 Must issue a STARTTLS command first

[Phil H]

Using Mandrill as an SMTP server

Hi Kenny,

Did you continue with Mandrill/switch to Mandrill with MailChimp or not? Any comments if you did? We are already with MailChimp and considering the best option to hook our sales contacts from SellerDeck into Mailchimp. If you have any thoughts on this let me know.

Cheers


Phil

PS just had a fine weekend in the Cairngorms

[raj_arora]

I managed to get working with https://www.mailjet.com/

Mandrill recommended migrating to SparkPost, but I couldn't get that to work, after 3 hours of trying!

Not sure why Sellerdeck don't offer a solution for this directly.