We’re one week away from the day that MandrillApp turns off its email service. Are you ready?
If your WordPress, CMS or e-commerce site sends email, chances are that you will be affected – your site will stop sending emails.
“So Mandrill is used to send email from my website?”. It’s quite possible. Chances are that, as we advised a year ago, you or your webmaster setup Mandrill to do this heavy lifting.
If this is in-fact the case, it means that on April 27th email on your website will not work. The end.
Read on to find out if you’re affected, and what you need to do.
What is Mandrill and why should I give a monkeys’? (pun intended)
Does your WordPress, Magento, Drupal, CMS send emails? How does it send those emails?
You either know what I’m talking about, or you might be thinking it’s using the magic email fairy that just “does it” automatically.
Nearly 2 months ago Mandrill announced that it’s going away. That is, on 27th April it’ll no longer be a standalone service and if you want to continue to use it, you’ll need a paid Mailchimp account to do so.
If your site is using Mandrill to send emails, then your website email will stop running.
What do I need to do?
You first need to determine if any of your websites use MandrillApp to send emails.
If you’re running WordPress, look in your list of plugins for “mandrill”. Unless there are others, the main Mandrill plugin for WordPress is called wpMandrill. If you have it on and active, you’re most likely using it for emails and you need to fix this by April 27th.
If you use another CMS, or Magento or other such, you need to search to see if Mandrill is your choice for transactional emails. If it in-doubt, consult your web developer or any developer for assistance in this.
Once you’ve determined that you are relying on Mandrill, you need to do one of 2 things:
- Sign-up for Mailchimp and link your Mandrill account to it. If you need help with this, you’ll need to talk with Mailchimp.
- Find an alternative to Mandrill. We have chosen Mailgun, but there are many other options. Another is SendInBlue and they also have a WordPress plugin.
Mailgun – our alternative to MandrillApp
To get started with Mailgun, sign-up with their service here. Then you’ll need to walk through their setup for your particular web domain.
Once all this is done and confirmed, you’ll need to remove Mandrill from your site, add the Mailgun plugin, and configure it. You should also fire off a quick email test.
What’s next?
This is clearly not a how-to on how to set it all up… but a reminder that you need to review your email sending infrastructure.
Nothing remains the same and free (and paid) services come and go… you need to stay on top of it.
