Is Your Mandrill Account In Jeopardy of Being Disabled?
Mandrill recently announced that it would no longer be offered as a standalone service, but as an add on for paid monthly MailChimp accounts.
As of April 27, 2016 your Mandrill account will be disabled if you don’t have a paid monthly MailChimp account merged with your Mandrill account.
Sign up for a MailChimp account to avoid the cancellation and your transactional emails will continue to flow! As of March 16, 2016 all new Mandrill accounts will be created and accessed through MailChimp. Read more on the changes via the MailChimp blog.
What Do You Need to Do?
- If you already have a paid monthly MailChimp account follow these instructions to merge your accounts.
- If you don’t have a paid monthly MailChimp account, create one at mailchimp.com. We will walk you through the process of merging the accounts:
NOTE – Starting April 27, 2016 Mandrill will not send any email from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records, including public domains like gmail.com and yahoo.com. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to add SPF and DKIM records and verify ownership of your sending domains. Here’s an article explaining how to do that – we also explain below.
Connecting Your Mandrill and MailChimp Accounts
Go to mailchimp.com and sign up for a paid account. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be sent an email to Activate Account. In order to continue using Mandrill, your MailChimp account will need to be upgraded to a monthly plan. Any paid monthly MailChimp plan will do – plans start at $10/month.
Mandrill is a paid add-on for any MailChimp monthly plan in which users purchase “blocks” of 25,000 emails. The price of each block starts at $20, but decreases as you purchase additional monthly blocks. Once you’ve created your MailChimp account and successfully upgraded to a paid monthly plan follow these steps to merge your accounts and convert your Mandrill account to a paid MailChimp add-on:
- Ensure that each of your sending domains in Mandrill is fully configured. After merging with a MailChimp account, any mail sent through Mandrill from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records will be rejected.
Note: See Part 2 of this blog where we explain adding SPF and DKIM records and verifying ownership of your sending domain through your domains DNS settings or cPanel. - Log in to the MailChimp account that you want to connect with your Mandrill account.
- Navigate to the Transactional page in your MailChimp account and click Upgrade.
4. Click Add Mandrill and select Yes, I have an existing Mandrill account.
5. When prompted, enter the username, password, and any multi-factor authentication information (if applicable) for the Mandrill account being linked to authorize that connection. Click Continue with the Linking Process to configure billing for Mandrill.
6. Choose the number of transactional email blocks that you’ll purchase at the beginning of each billing cycle. Blocks expire at the end of each billing cycle. For more information, see How Mandrill Billing Works. We purchased one block of 25,000 emails.
7. Configure your account to help prevent any disruption in sending due to exceeding the number of purchased email credits for that billing cycle. After setting a threshold of remaining email credits, you can choose to receive an alert or set up your account to automatically purchase additional top-off blocks when that threshold is reached.
8. After confirming the billing information, complete the checkout process by clicking Complete Purchase to finalize the merge between your MailChimp and Mandrill accounts. Please note that this step is irreversible—after a Mandrill account has been converted to a MailChimp add-on, it cannot be linked to any other MailChimp account.