Mandrill Changes

[SimonQ]

Mandrill recently sent out an email today and basically said that we'd be required to have a paid monthly account with MailChimp to continue using their services.

For someone who doesn't generate a lot of traffic nor send out that many emails are there any alternatives to Mandrill now? Does NodeBB currently use Mandrill as an emailing service?

[pichalite]

@SimonQ try mailgun or mailjet

https://github.com/julianlam/nodebb-plugin-emailer-mailgun

https://github.com/pichalite/nodebb-plugin-emailer-mailjet

[Kowlin]

I highly recommend mailgun. Never had a issue with them after switching

[yariplus]

I like mailgun as well. And the name is pretty sweet.

[julian]

I'm disappointed in the news of Mandrill cancelling their free tier, but ultimately, it is their decision, and we must respect that.

I'm disappointed mostly because our mandrill plugin is by far the most developed, with support for incoming emails.

We typically recommend SendGrid now, though it, like Mandrill, seems to suffer from the same slow website.

Potentially may bring inbound emails to SendGrid, not sure whether there is a better option on the table.

[whitts]

@julian Man, i wish the local emailer plugin could receive emails..

[SimonQ]

Thanks for the info everyone I will take a look at all the recommendations. Just a pain to set everything up again on a new service.

[Kowlin]

@whitts well, unless you want to go through all the hoops of setting up your own mail service either for private use or letting us leech onto you ;). Its still a pain, my local ISP blocks outbound 22, forwarding mail to Google and so is confusing (atleast for me) and the plain setup of a good and secure mail server is even worse then forwarding it in my opinion. I really feel like somewhere within there how many years we have the email protocalls someone decided...

Lets screw up majorly

[julian]

@Kowlin Eh, the way I see it, email and other assorted protocols were developed back when there were no other protocols or similar services to build off of, so it was really just the wild west.

Also, it seems everybody trusted one another and nobody expected spam to even exist, so it was never conditioned for, so now we have all of these bolt-on things you have to do to make sure your mail isn't sent straight to the spam bin... SPF records, DKIM signing, etc...

It's a miracle email actually still works the way it does.