Does anyone know of an open source Mandrill clone, preferably self-hosted? Finding someone to do newsletters or simply doing via traditional mailing-list software is pretty easy, but finding an alternative for Mandrill is a bit harder.
We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone else would already have done.
We're building a self-hosted service similar to Mandrill for bulk and transactional email on https://highrisehq.com. Mandrill was the only service that offered unlimited sub-accounts each with their own reputation and quota. We relied on that to offer bulk email to our customers, and since there’s no good alternative we need to build it in-house. In addition to sub-accounts & quota management, we needed open+click analytics, templates, and a fast RPC api. We also don’t want an email provider going dark on us again, so it’ll support sending from a pool of email providers. Mailgun is the one we’re using first (it’s been great so far) then likely SES.
We’re going to open source it at some point. It’s written in Go with a Postgres backend so deployment is straight forward — should be able to get decent mileage off a single Heroku dyno. I look forward to sharing more soon!
We looked down this path, but ultimately just didn't want to be responsible for SMTP servers.
Now we're with Sparkpost, the rate was actually a touch cheaper (by maybe a few hundred a month on a several thousand dollar bill). There are plenty of features they don't have (or don't have working correctly when we tried):
* Css inlining, we opted for doing this ourselves after trying theirs.
* Account sending limits. With mandrill this was managed based on our usage, with Sparkpost, it needs to be manually adjusted through support (hint: you also need to monitor this, they won't warn you if you near limits).
* Tagging of emails is different, less searchable but generally its better in some ways and worse in others.
We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone else would already have done.