Migrating From Mandrill To Mailgun

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Mailchimp has recently decided to retire their standalone Mandrill product and fuse their transactional business with their larger Mailchimp product. Due to this we’ve received an influx of questions on what Mailgun has to offer, what pricing looks like, and how to transition. This blog post seeks to address those questions.

Who We Are

Founded in 2010, Mailgun was launched around the idea that sending transactional e-mail reliably was a major pain point for developers. Our approach resonated and we were acquired by Rackspace in 2012. While we continue operate as an independent business, we have access to over 6,000 Rackers with deep infrastructure, networking, and development expertise.

How to Migrate to Mailgun

Sandbox & Custom Domains

When you first sign up for an account, Mailgun will provision a sandbox domain that you can use for testing purposes while you get started. Our sandbox domains limit you to sending 300 messages per day so when you’re ready to move from testing to production you’d simply create a custom domain.

We also require that you configure both an SPF and DKIM record on your domain. These records can easily be configured with your DNS management tool. While this is a difference from other ESPs, this step also helps you build a domain reputation that is unique and increase your overall message deliverability over time.

An important difference with Mailgun is that we manage reputation on both the account and domain level, which allows you to better isolate your traffic. For example, if a single domain is compromised and we need to pause your sending, we only limit the impacted domain.

Rate Limiting

Mailgun does not impose arbitrary rate limits on your account as you are ramping up. We have sophisticated monitoring tools that we use to analyze sending patterns and content to protect reputation. When our automated decisions can’t make a determination about a sending pattern, we alert our support team so they can immediately review the activity to make a determination.

Data Privacy

We respect the privacy of your e-mail messages and believe that your messages shouldn’t be mined for marketing purposes. The content of your e-mails are strictly used for compliance and fraud detection purposes. Mailgun has a detailed privacy policy where you can learn more about how we handle your personal information here.

API & SMTP

Like Mandrill, Mailgun offers an easy-to-use REST API for integrating your application with Mailgun. The documentation for our API along with code samples for most major programming languages is located here. Most of the concepts supported in the Mandrill API are also supported in Mailgun’s API.

If you are simply using the Mandrill SMTP integration, you should be able to easily define a new hostname, username and password provided by Mailgun in order to migrate your application. Read more about configuring your servers or application to use the Mailgun SMTP integration here.

Other considerations in choosing an ESP

Simple Pricing

With Mailgun, you simply pay for the e-mails you send every month and any dedicated IPs you require. To reduce complexity Mailgun offers an easy to use pricing calculator to assist in calculating your potential monthly usage. As you use more Mailgun the price automatically shifts to the next tier. This model also has the benefit of not penalizing our customers when they go over a “plan” by applying heavy overages at a higher price multiple.

With Mailgun, your first 10,000 messages are free. You don’t need to commit to a payment method to test the service out, though once a card is on file you will be able to:

• Ability to send and receive unlimited messages

• 30 day log retention

• Multiple user accounts

• Up to 1,000 custom domains

Built for Developers

We’re committed to open sourcing tools and technologies that have helped make Mailgun successful. Some of the tools we have released include a Go debugger, cryptography tools,microservice load balancer, mime parsing library and responsive e-mail templates.

Powerful Support

Our support team is available to answer any questions regarding how best to use our product or to help fix or escalate any feature that is not performing as intended. They also have great expertise regarding developing a delivery strategy. If you’re sending a large volume of email or have other specific needs outside of our general support team’s scope we offer a Managed Mailgun Plan that dedicates a technical account manager committed to ensuring the highest delivery rate possible.

Finally, we know migrating is a pain so Mailgun is committed to making this as smooth as possible. Let us know if you have any questions by sending us an email or by leaving your comments.