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Mandrill users are being notified that the service is being integrated into Mailchimp, and you must have a paid account by the end of April.
What alternatives are out there that work well with CiviCRM? Some that look interesting might be Sendgrid, Mailjet or Mailgun.
Any experiences with these?
SparkPost is great, but the UI is a little lacking, but as far as sending is concerned, it works great. My company also just developed and extension for processing bounces from SparkPosts in Civi.
I was asked to post a roundup of a variety of alternatives--the writeup is here: https://civicrm.org/blog/andrewhunt/alternatives-to-mandrill
Tommy also suggested I build a calculator to compare costs.
[edit follows] We also have some clients using SendGrid, which has worked fairly nicely. An extension by IMBA is available on GitHub (mentioned in the blog post), but at the moment (May 2016) it only works for Drupal. I made some changes to it in order to work for some WordPress clients, and I offered it as a pull request for them. If you are using WordPress or Joomla, you should look at [my fork] instead. I'll try to remember to update this when things change.
We are using mailjet and it works fine, but they are VERY cautious (eg. they threatened to block us because our spam rate came around 0.08% in three separate mailings, where we are normally < 0.01%) . The main reason we use mailjet is that it's based in the EU, so for privacy reason and with the problems around the safe harbour agreement, we preferred them.
One other organisation doing lots of mailing is using sendgrid, but not sure what's the status of integration with civi
@netzih points out another MailGun extension (by @artfulrobot) which looks more up to date, uses current webhooks and other non-legacy settings. I will do some testing with it, too:
I have set up a Mailgun account and done some testing, and the SMTP functionality seems to work fine.
I've recently installed this extension on a site that is using MailGun and preliminary results look good:
https://github.com/blackbricksoftware/uk.teamsinger.civicrm.mailgun
(This is a fork of https://github.com/teamsinger/uk.teamsinger.civicrm.mailgun which hasn't been updated recently, but may be in the future according to the author).
The setup is a little more complex than (for example) the Sparkpost or Mandrill usage where you just input the API information, but perhaps that will be improved upon in future versions. This version requires you to set up a "Mail Account" for Bounce Processing using the "MailgunDB" protocol, and then have the "Fetch Bounced Messages" scheduled job active. "Legacy Webhooks" need to be defined in MailGun. Sending is done using basic SMTP credentials.
We use sendgrid, simple to setup for the entire server. It is free if you have less than 12,000 emails a month. We are moving to 4.7 the sendgrid extension does not support it yet.
A good alternative is SendinBlue, because they offer a free plan allowing you to send up to 9k emails/month forever. And the same account can be used to send both transactional emails and newsletters. Plus they have some interesting plugins (WP, PrestaShop,..)
SparkPost has pretty amazing pricing and is apparently the only alternative Mandrill refer to. Anyone have experience with them?
