Is Your Mandrill Account In Jeopardy of Being Disabled?

Mandrill recently announced that it would no longer be offered as a standalone service, but as an add on for paid monthly MailChimp accounts.

As of April 27, 2016 your Mandrill account will be disabled if you don’t have a paid monthly MailChimp account merged with your Mandrill account.

Sign up for a MailChimp account to avoid the cancellation and your transactional emails will continue to flow! As of March 16, 2016 all new Mandrill accounts will be created and accessed through MailChimp. Read more on the changes via the MailChimp blog.

What Do You Need to Do?

• If you already have a paid monthly MailChimp account follow these instructions to merge your accounts.
• If you don’t have a paid monthly MailChimp account, create one at mailchimp.com. We will walk you through the process of merging the accounts:

NOTE – Starting April 27, 2016 Mandrill will not send any email from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records, including public domains like gmail.com and yahoo.com. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to add SPF and DKIM records and verify ownership of your sending domains. Here’s an article explaining how to do that – we also explain below.

Connecting Your Mandrill and MailChimp Accounts 

Go to mailchimp.com and sign up for a paid account. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be sent an email to Activate Account. In order to continue using Mandrill, your MailChimp account will need to be upgraded to a monthly plan. Any paid monthly MailChimp plan will do – plans start at $10/month.

Mandrill is a paid add-on for any MailChimp monthly plan in which users purchase “blocks” of 25,000 emails. The price of each block starts at $20, but decreases as you purchase additional monthly blocks. Once you’ve created your MailChimp account and successfully upgraded to a paid monthly plan follow these steps to merge your accounts and convert your Mandrill account to a paid MailChimp add-on:

1. Ensure that each of your sending domains in Mandrill is fully configured. After merging with a MailChimp account, any mail sent through Mandrill from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records will be rejected.
   Note: See Part 2 of this blog where we explain adding SPF and DKIM records and verifying ownership of your sending domain through your domains DNS settings or cPanel.
2. Log in to the MailChimp account that you want to connect with your Mandrill account.
3. Navigate to the Transactional page in your MailChimp account and click Upgrade.

4. Click Add Mandrill and select Yes, I have an existing Mandrill account.

5. When prompted, enter the username, password, and any multi-factor authentication information (if applicable) for the Mandrill account being linked to authorize that connection. Click Continue with the Linking Process to configure billing for Mandrill.

6. Choose the number of transactional email blocks that you’ll purchase at the beginning of each billing cycle. Blocks expire at the end of each billing cycle. For more information, see How Mandrill Billing Works.  We purchased one block of 25,000 emails.

7. Configure your account to help prevent any disruption in sending due to exceeding the number of purchased email credits for that billing cycle. After setting a threshold of remaining email credits, you can choose to receive an alert or set up your account to automatically purchase additional top-off blocks when that threshold is reached.

8. After confirming the billing information, complete the checkout process by clicking Complete Purchase to finalize the merge between your MailChimp and Mandrill accounts. Please note that this step is irreversible—after a Mandrill account has been converted to a MailChimp add-on, it cannot be linked to any other MailChimp account.

Download a PDF of this blog here: Mandrill MailChimp 1

This posting will show you how to quickly create personalized icons on your Mac and Windows desktops in order to more easily locate important files and improve the aesthetic of your workspace.

Mac Tutorial

On a Mac, you can change the icon of an application, folder, or file on your desktop using the following steps:

Step 1: Open an image you want to use in Preview

Step 2: Copy the image

Step 3: Select “Get Info” on the file or folder you want to customize

Step 4: Click on the folder you’ve selected and press “Paste”

Result: The old generic folder icon has now been customized

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Windows Tutorial

In Windows, you can change desktop icons as well.

Step 1: Download an image or draw one in Paint and save it as .ico (Microsoft icon)

Step 2: Resize the image to 32 pixels x 32 pixels

Step 3: Right click on a desktop icon you want to change and click “Properties”

Step 4: Select “Change Icon”

Step 5: Find the icon you created and select “OK”

Result: Your desktop icon has been customized

Download a PDF of this blog here: Customize Your Icons

 

 

 

Businesses of every size rely on email as a basic process; therefore, setting up an email system is generally one of the first items on the list of to-dos. As the business grows, it soon comes to light that the existing email setup is not the most effective tool for the many types of emails that are useful to internal staff and those that affect your customers.

Bulk email solutions for notifications, reminders and other tasks, in general, are the worst tool for a job: your email (that you spent time and money crafting) will likely be marked as spam. Your account may be blocked if you try and send too may emails per hour and you soon realize that support for dynamic data driven HTML emails are seriously lacking.

What to do? This is where an email service such as Mandrill or Amazon Web Services, just two examples among many platforms, can fill the gap and add important functionality. Built for sending “transactional” emails, these solutions can easily integrate into your existing business solution.

Transactional email is targeted to an individual based on a prescribed action, or inaction, of the recipient. Think about order confirmations, notifications, reminders and a multitude of other services that you would not want to send out on an individual basis. This is where an email service comes to the rescue – check out these links for some great information on the importance of transactional email:

blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email

mailjet.com/transactional

sendgrid.com/resources/what-is-transactional-email

blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-a-transactional-email

When defining your business strategy it is important to know whether your emails are being opened, and if the embedded links are being clicked on – this is your first measure to see if the marketing campaign is successful. It is just as important to know how internal users are using email services. Over time, literally hundreds of reports may be created and sent out – who knows how useful the reports still are? Is that marketing report you set up in 1998 still being used?

Many of these transactional email services provide an easy way of sending HTML emails. These are great, not only for sending better-looking email with interesting photos and graphics, but they also allow the recipient to perform many actions beyond just replying to the email. For instance, recipients can open a website, initiate a phone call on their cell, or join a FaceTime conference on their Mac.

HTML emails even allow interaction directly with business systems. You can bring up a list of projects requiring your attention for that day with the click of a link in an email. You can drill down into further details of a product by bringing up its record and then view all related photos and documentation. Another benefit is allowing users to get rich, tailored, customized data from a business system, even if they are not allowed direct access; essentially you supply information while controlling by role. You can also allow tightly controlled input into your system with links to HTML forms online from customers and employees without giving them direct access to your system.

Email services, by their very nature, are built for easy integration. If you have ever had to deal with your IT department or large service provider to make changes to your email, you know the headache that comes with the change. Imagine the headache on an ongoing basis. By utilizing an email service you gain the ability to keep your primary email service nice and tidy and your IT folks happy, while allowing rich interaction with other applications and services.

Revolution11 has worked with several clients on transactional email integration within their FileMaker solution – please contact us for insight into the experience or assistance with setting up your own system.

Get a PDF of this post here: Transactional Email