Using Mandrill email service for business applications

Mandrill is an email infrastructure service. To get Mandrill email service you can register as free or paid member. Free member has some restriction on sending email per day while paid member has some plans and depending on that plan user can send email. Mandrill provides a dashbord and search utility to track all status of emails. 

What is Mandrill?

Mandrill is designed to help applications or websites that need to send email like password resets, order confirmations, and welcome messages. You can send any legal, non-spam emails through Mandrill. In your website or application when you want to send email just send all information like who is sending email (sender), receiver, body of the email (text/html), subject (default subject can be set from mandril service). Mandrill can apply template to email, create link to automatically open in browser. Once email is delivered to receiver it keep track of open and click. After you send, measure the performance for your emails to learn how recipients are interacting, whether your emails might be ending up in spam folders etc.
If your website is sedning email through smtp, you can change a few settings and start sending through Mandrill.

How do I get started with Mandrill?

To start sending email through Mandrill signup on If you are Mandrill user then you can send up to 12,000 emails per month through Mandrill, completely free. If you are already user of MailChimp then you will get additional benifits after creating Mandrill account. To get this benifit you have to connect your  MailChimp account with Mandrill. Once you created account with  Mandrill you have to setup sending domains. If you are already sending email through SMTP then change your SMTP settings to your Mandrill SMTP credentials.
There are some limitations on sending emails. Each account has an hourly sending quota based on the account reputation and typical volume of email. Message size should be less then or equal to 25Mb. You can include any type of attachment and inline images. Messages with attachments will be queued and all attachments run through a series of virus scanning engines.

Mandrill Test Mode

To send email in test mode through Mandrill you have to create a test API key. Test mode records stats and activity separately from your main account. Free Mandrill accounts can generate up to 1,000 test emails per day and paid accounts can generate up to 10,000.

How to apply template to Mandrill email?

Templates allow you to create your email design and store commonly used content to re-use for various emails. You can store the templates in Mandrill and then send email using the template and providing dynamic, recipient-specific content. There are some advantages of using Mandrill templates insteed of sending full html email each time. You have to just provide dynamic content Mandrill will apply template to it. Mandrill templates are easy to edit and it can be maintained by non developer also.

Open and Click Tracking

When click-tracking is enabled for email sent through Mandrill, tracking information will be added to any links in your HTML content that are enclosed in HTML link tags. For text content, Mandrill will add link-tracking to things in your content that appear to be links. There are some cases where link-tracking won't be added to a link, though, so Mandrill won't be able to track those clicks e.g. Mailto links and long links.


Activity for your Mandrill account can be exported. You can select any filters, such as date range, tag, sender and delivery status and export the reports of emails. There is also facility of Queued exports. When report is ready an email will be sent with the link to download the file. Export download links expire after 7 days. Detailed information for delivered messages is stored for 30 days, while bounced message data is kept for 90 days for record-keeping purposes. Overall statistics (total deliveries, bounces and rejections, along with unique opens, unique clicks, total opens, and total clicks) are stored indefinitely.

Mandrill email service features

  1. You can run spam test on template
  2. You can shedule a message to send at specific time
  3. You can set up alerts in your Mandrill account and receive email or SMS notifications about changes in sending volume, reputation, bounce rates etc.
  4. You can set automatic add un-subscribe link in email.
  5. You can be paused temporarily
  6. You can also receive bounce notifications via email
  7. You can send Mandrill emails on behalf of clients, users, or customers, and even set up custom signing domains for outgoing email.
  8. Mandrill's free account allows access to all features of Mandrill except a dedicated IP address.


Categories: APIs, Flow Framework
