One advantage that Mandrill has over SendGrid is the ability to see the content of emails (run a web agency so it helps a lot with troubleshooting for our clients).

That makes a lot of sense! On the backend, we've already built a way to view content samples (for compliance reasons, e.g. if something looks spammy and we need a human to confirm). It would certainly be possible to expose that functionality to users. I'll run that by the PM on the relevant team - you're not alone in wanting that feature.

Definitely +1 on this. It's a great feature to see if A) emails are being sent and B) templates weren't messed up in some way.

(I have had many a batch email with "{{name}" or some other templating error, heh.)

I just tried SendGrid out now, unless I'm mistaken you can't even see subject line in the emails that are sent, is this correct?

You can look in the Email Activity tab to see a history of events, along with their category (you might use this for "receipt", "forgot password", etc.).

https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/email_activity.html

If you're doing one-to-many campaigns, we also have a marketing email product called Marketing Campaigns that offers a more detailed content history.

We're working on adding that feature into Mailgun now. We store the content for compliance review and scheduled sends.

Disclosure: I lead product development @ Mailgun.

That would an amazing feature add.

I'm currently sending 150k/mo with Mailgun and log everything for 6 months. It's rarely accessed, but invaluable when it is.

For your reference: http://blog.mailgun.com/how-to-view-your-messages/

I think NOW it's the time to build that feature, ASAP. cc @etjossem

Yeah absolutely if SendGrid builds this functionality and creates a 'Welcome Mandrill customers' page, then you guys will get a whole heap of new signups right away!

Agree 100%.. this is an insane move by Mandrill and if SendGrid can at least show email subjects they will reap the benefits imo !

We're discussing what it would take to build it right now. It's absolutely one of the things people appreciated about Mandrill, and I know we want to ease the transition as much as possible.

Today, we launched a new API that allows you to access the content of messages you've sent over the last three days. We have details on our blog @ http://blog.mailgun.com/how-to-view-your-messages/

We do this (Sendwithus.com) -- not only see email with all personalization, but see it on the device a customer used (was the link really broken on an iPhone?)

CSS inlining as well - last time we looked SendGrid did not have this functionality.

There are lots of existing resources out there for automatically inlining CSS after writing your template, so we recommend you use whichever one you like best.

Zurb Foundation has one with a web interface: http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/inliner.html

I personally prefer Jon Kemp's open source inliner, which is a good choice if you want to do that step locally: https://github.com/jonkemp/inline-css

FWIW We left SendGrid because it was impossible to troubleshoot sends. When asked SendGrid's response was email subjects are coming but for now you can tag your emails with tags/categories. I know it's probably not simple to implement but it might be worth something to you guys in terms of business. It looks like subjects are still not supported unless I'm missing them. I'm looking at the "Activity" screen.

Is it possible to have more than 300 templates per account? We're offering custom transactional email templates to our clients and might exceed this limit. Definitely looking at moving to SendGrid after this announcement.

Previewing content of the last 7 days of sent emails would also be a bonus.

Check us out (Sendwithus.com, yc w14)

Unlimited templates, and you can swap out backends (SendGrid, SparkPost, others)

Thanks, but your pricing model is all wrong when it comes to transactional emails. We're looking for something which is more usage based instead of based on number of subscribers. Nice templating though.

I agree here. Pricing model is wrong for transactional emails

Any good examples on using templating with variables in SendGrid? The docs are not very clear on that (you call them tags is that it?). I think you can get a lot of users if you show one to one mapping of API and common processes between Mandrill and SendGrid.

A few years ago I went with Mandrill over SendGrid because of the lack of templates. I wanted designers/marketers to be able to edit the templates and with sendgrid that was really difficult. A couple years later and you guys caught up and then some. Excited to come back after this Mandrill change!

I am in the same boat. Glad to also give SendGrid a look!

Yep, if you're using the SMTP API, see https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/SMTP_API/substitutio....

If you're using a wrapper like sendgrid-ruby (https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby), check out its documentation page on GitHub. For instance, here's how to use substitution tags in Ruby: https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-ruby#working-with-templ...

Also check us out: https://www.sendwithus.com/docs/templating

Our template engine (Jinja) is the most advanced of any email platform out there.

Stop spamming your service all throughout the thread. It's annoying and certainly turns me off to it.

I would say their pricing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11172142 is more off putting than the spam. Its almost quaint.

Oh thanks for that. I was already typing "Mandrill alternative" on google.

I need to send around 180k emails. Is that 2 x 100k for $19.95 ?