Post your results of turning off IPS PHPMail

[MGBrose]

Recently our board switched from IPS PHP Mail to SMTP based Mandrill recently discussed on IPS Blog here, alternatively the other big option is sendgrid. And we had unbelievable results. So I'm starting this thread to get everyone else's feedback on their experience switching away from IPS PHPMail.

Our Experience:

We do not necessarily have a large board, but we have a fairly active niche community. Before on PHP Mail it seemed only 50% of our members were receiving notifications(transactional emails were not even making it into the spam box), others were sometimes receiving them sometimes not. We've struggled with this problem for the last 2 years. We've attempted switching to trying to use google apps via SMTP, using CPanels email server (which is a pig by the way), and then I pretty much just plane gave up in frustration, and switched it back to PHP Mail, before we tried mandrill.

I have to say Mandrill has been a breeze to setup. Getting the DKIM/SPF records to validate was easy. The initial throttling of the account kind of stinks, but it makes sense for them to keep us from sending hundreds of emails an hour until they can see if we are legit or not. It took us about 12 hours to get up to the ability to send 300 emails an hour (and we only send on average 350 per day). The great thing for us is since were below about 400 emails a day we should be able to lurk in the free tier of under 12,000 emails a month for a little while. And pricing is pretty reasonable above that.

Our users are happier than ever finally being able to get notified reliably via email. And its resulted in increase to forum activity. Lastly the other benefit is for us to be able to track whats going on with emails analytically before we had no clue what kind of usage was happening, how many were getting delivered, etc.

I'd say the switch is 100% worth it, I think if you have a larger site; the resulting activity increases from switching away from PHP to a reliable transactional email services could be even greater.

[Dmacleo]

so you were able to set it up on a 3.3.4 based board?

I asked before and was told it had to be 3.4.

[MGBrose]

so you were able to set it up on a 3.3.4 based board?

I asked before and was told it had to be 3.4.

Yep 3.3.4, I simply use Mandrill via SMTP. I think 3.4 will just allow raw API level integration(Which could be quicker?). I'm not sure the benefits between the two, but it seems like SMTP works perfectly.

[Dmacleo]

cool, I suspected it would work but had not had chance to follow up.

thanks.

[avro]

How much does this cost you? How many members do you have?

[Grumpy]

I use amazon ses, so much cheaper than sendgrid....... if you passed their free tier anyway. Though, must say, they do have nicer graphs and more features.

I send roughly 2000 emails per day. (2000 x $0.10/1000 x 30 = $6/month for 60,000 mails!)

I have on avg 1 bounce a day. 0.5 complaints a day. 0 rejects a day (with some margin of error...).

I probably have lot better ratio than you do, not necessarily because amazon ses > sendgrid, but because I pay attention to every single emails that doesn't get sent properly and take care of it. I don't let my forum keep sending stupid emails.

[MGBrose]

I use amazon ses, so much cheaper than sendgrid....... if you passed their free tier anyway. Though, must say, they do have nicer graphs and more features.

I send roughly 2000 emails per day. (2000 x $0.10/1000 x 30 = $6/month for 60,000 mails!)

I have on avg 1 bounce a day. 0.5 complaints a day. 0 rejects a day (with some margin of error...).

I probably have lot better ratio than you do, not necessarily because amazon ses > sendgrid, but because I pay attention to every single emails that doesn't get sent properly and take care of it. I don't let my forum keep sending stupid emails.

I'll have to check out amazon, we don't send nearly that many emails a day with about 28,000 members (over 10 years). We use amazon cloudfront as well so using another amazon product wouldn't be painful at all to us.

[Feld0]

Thanks for sharing, MGBrose and Grumpy. It's certainly neat to see some real-world results from a switch to Mandrill.

I considered making the switch myself; but unfortunately, it would be prohibitively expensive for me. My community sends out 15,000 emails a day, give or take several thousand, which would cost in the neighbourhood of $300/month with Mandrill. I'd end up paying more for email delivery than hosting!

SendGrid would cost roughly as much as Mandrill, but Amazon looks like it would be significantly cheaper at ~$50-$60/month for my usage. Still, I'm having a hard time deciding whether I truly need a dedicated email service. I haven't heard any complaints about about emails not arriving from my members; and I do my best to deal with the occasional bounce expediently. Detailed statistics and the ability to track clicks on email links certainly sound alluring, but I'm not so sure the ROI will be worthwhile.

[avro]

Can you please post a lik to the amazon email service?

[MGBrose]

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

[Michael.J]

Thanks for sharing MGBrose. I take it you've just been using it for day to day emails or have you had a chance to try out a bulk mail?

[MGBrose]

Thanks for sharing MGBrose. I take it you've just been using it for day to day emails or have you had a chance to try out a bulk mail?

No Problem, I haven't used it for bulk mail, I just use it for notifications, but I'm sure it would work just fine.

We just never really send out bulk mail, only if we have a major issue will we use bulk.

[Dmacleo]

just a note if anyone does the smtp, the "password" you use to access is not the password entered in IP settings.

in IP you enter the api key for password.