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I am new to Mandrill and its integration. Can anyone help me to figure out the advantages of using Mandrill? What can be done using Mandrill other than sending messages and tracking them?

tanuja90
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2 Answers2

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Mandrill has many uses. You might have seen those on their website itself. Actually its a Mail Transaporter like PHP mailer, but it uses their own server for sending mails.

As said on their website,

Mandrill runs on a globally distributed infrastructure that can deliver emails in milliseconds.

This is because when you send a mail through their SMTP or send.json (API) method, the send mail possibly see the fastest path algorithm to deliver a mail. That's why it take milliseconds to deliver. They have ~7 different mail servers worldwide for this.

Major Features,

  1. Sending mails fastly than our own server using PHP Mailer.
  2. Sending mails via pre-designed templates which can be reusable by the merge vars we're using.
  3. Support multiple language platforms like, cURL, JSON, Python, PHP, Ruby, Nodejs, Dart and also their depending frameworks.
  4. It tracks clicks from the mail we sent. For Ex: each and every url link in our sent mails is redirected only after tracking from mandrillapp site. This enables mandrill to track the no of opens in a mail and track analytics.
  5. Through mandrill we can construct our own mail sending application or integrate into an existing application.
  6. It's mostly used for Transactional Messages like functions like welcome mail, forgot password, cart details and etc.
  7. It can be integrated into other shopping cart web applications.
  8. Their api call works on even in the developer environment.
  9. Lesser spam.
  10. Verified domain options like DKIM and SPF settings. This enables the mails to identified by major email providers like gmail, google, etc.
  11. It can be used as SMTP version and can be integrated into major SMTP applications.
  12. Reports: Demographics of email send, Compare status, Which url in our mails has been clicked and no of counts.
  13. Setup rule for delivering emails.
  14. A/B testing, custom SMTP headers, Inbound domains and etc.

There are many other features in developer perspective. If you mention in which platform you're trying to use mandrill addditional details can be provide.

Hope this might help you.

Prassanna D Manikandan
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  • Thank you so much Prassanna. Your reply was really helpful. I am trying to integrate Mandrill into a Yii application. Can I know if it is possible to retrieve the messages in the inbox and display it it the application? – tanuja90 Oct 13 '15 at 05:49
  • Note: the SMTP version has some limitations, including problems I've run into with properly QP encoding. I would strongly advise using API and not SMTP interface. (The SMTP interface merely produces an API call as its output, but did not do it well.) – J.T. Taylor Mar 29 '16 at 23:29
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To name a few, You can 1) use templates to do A/B testing ( which allow you to experiment with different templates, and end up with something which is effective). 2) use Embedded images , which will reduce the chance that your emails will end up in spam.

Hope this helps,

Kiran Indukuri
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  • Thank you Kiran for your response. I would like to discuss something about the templates. Currently, I use PHPMailer for sending mails and I've stored the template in my database. These template have content for system generated messages. While sending each mail, the dynamic content are added using simple str_replace() function in PHP. Just want to know if it is possible to generate template with default content and replace certain words (like recipient name) with the dynamic content using Mandrill templates? – tanuja90 Sep 23 '15 at 03:46
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    Sure Tanuja, you can get dynamic content with templates. "global_merge_vars": [ { "name": "user_name", "content": "Mandrill_User1" } ] and in the template you can say
    {{#if user_name}}

    Thanks for registering! Your username is {{user_name}}.

    {{/if}}
    This link https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205582537-Using-Handlebars-for-dynamic-content has detailed info.     – Kiran Indukuri Sep 23 '15 at 04:22