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sbull / banana_peels

Ruby/Rails interface for using MailChimp as a template repository for transactional emails.
MIT License
2 stars 1 forks source link

This violates MailChimps Acceptable Usage Policy #1

Open jessedp opened 11 years ago

jessedp commented 11 years ago

As published here: http://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/

Sending transactional emails via MailChimp is prohibited and grounds for account suspension/termination.

You are, however, welcome to use the template portion of this along with our transactional email service, Mandrill, to send transactional emails based on MailChimp templates.

Mandrill really is a much cleaner fit anyway - for example: http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21738467-Using-Mandrill-s-SMTP-integration-with-Web-Frameworks

sbull commented 11 years ago

Hi Jesse,

I'm actually doing exactly as you suggest.

This library doesn't provide anything for actually sending emails. What it does, however, is make it easy to use MailChimp campaigns (where you can set From address, Subject, HTML & Text content) for your email content (in Ruby/Rails), and provides the merge tag ability for a transaction. You still need to actually send the email through some SMTP service (or other mail service), there's nothing built here to help you with that - and it certainly doesn't use MailChimp servers to send any mail.

In essence, all this library does is allow you to store your transactional email templates as MailChimp campaigns as opposed to files in your source code.

I started doing this sort of thing a few years before Mandrill was announced, and a primary driver now for it is that Mandrill's UI doesn't seem to be as advanced for email creation / editing as MailChimp. Also, it's a bit clunky for users to navigate between MailChimp and Mandrill just because they're doing styling/editing of a transactional email vs. a bulk email.

If there's a way to use MailChimp campaigns more directly with Mandrill, I'd love to build something for that (as opposed to having to pull the content from MailChimp just to apply the merge tags and send it back through Mandrill). Although, I have run into some use cases where I've needed to do more advanced template manipulation than only applying merge tags, such as replicating a content section for each item in an order receipt, etc.

Do you still think this violates the AUP?

Thanks, Steve