Dear Mandrill Refugees: We’re confused too.

After the recent Mandrill announcement, I was as confused as many of you were.

When I read their blog post, which describes moving from the “utility” or “dumb pipe” path, and embracing the “personalized transactional” path, I wasn’t sure what this meant. This may mean they are discontinuing the ability to give them email for delivery via SMTP after the migration. (But it’s not yet possible to tell until I can merge a Mandrill and MailChimp account and try.)

And what motivated their changes? As an outsider, I have much respect for what they’ve done in the industry. We had heard speculation among industry insiders that Mandrill’s change may be driven by an outgoing email-abuse problem – that Mandrill was being used to send large amounts of unsolicited bulk email as a “dumb pipe.” Could this be their motivation?

One of the primary challenges and responsibilities of running an email delivery service is keeping unsolicited bulk email out – so a few bad apples don’t ruin the whole bunch. MailChimp’s non-Mandrill product has lead the industry in this, going so far as to crunch 61 trillion datapoints on a cutting-edge GPU “supercomputer” to build a better predictive engine back in 2008. As I said, we have a ton of respect for their work.

If the speculation is correct, then hats off to MailChimp! This is great for the internet. But this isn’t great for existing Mandrill customers, especially if SMTP access is removed. Some of you, who are ‘good apples’ are sending high volumes of really good email, yet you’re facing a price increase or switching providers. A recent prospect told us his change works out to a 3x increase!

This brings me to another team I respect.

The team at GreenArrow. Here we’re committed to flexible, scalable pricing. We pride ourselves on the personalized service and support we offer to every client – marketing and transactional. We also have an impressive track record of handling high-volume and high speed for clients who send millions of messages per hour or over one billion messages/month.

But GreenArrow isn’t for everyone.

We don’t specialize in free or low-volume accounts that are subsidized by larger accounts. (If you need those options, Mandrill has referrals here.) Instead, we offer competitive volume pricing with incredible support.

If you’re a high-volume sender who is sending relevant email with good engagement, we want to work with you. This includes ESPs, marketing agencies, retailers, and senders who have built a large, high-quality list over time. We also work well for lower-volume senders who want a real partner with deliverability: someone who will dig into the details to help improve their results.

We’d love to earn your business. Request a demo or free consultation today.