See When Clients Open Emails

[Parker1090]

NOTE: Since I signed up for my account, Mandrill have now started charging $9.95 a month. There is a free trial, but just be aware of this before deciding this is for you.

The Reason

A question I see appearing on this forum quite often is clients not receiving emails (for whatever reason). In some cases where you use your own mail server, it can be pretty tricky to see if an email was actually sent. Another question I’ve seen several times is “How can I see a copy of the email?”, which unfortunately, you can’t through QuickFile. Another - “Clients aren’t logging in to see my invoice”, which is frustrating, but you never really know if they receiving an email if they didn’t log in.

There is a solution… sort of.

Introducing - Mandrill

Mandrill is an email platform run by MailChimp. It allows you to send emails through their vast email network quickly and reliably. QuickFile doesn’t integrate with Mandrill (although through Zapier, there are some options), but there is another way to do it, and I want to share this.

What Mandrill can do, compared to a standard mail server, is track emails - opens, clicks, bounces etc. Some mail servers can do this, but some don’t report it back to you.

Getting Started

The first thing you need, is a Mandrill account. Mandrill is free for up to 12,000 email a month. You are however limited to initially 250 per hour, which increases the more it trusts your emails.

To get started, head over to https://www.mandrill.com and sign up - it’s quick and easy.

You’ll then be taken to your dashboard. Two main things to notice here:

The colour of the side bar

You’ll notice mine is orange, yours may be black. The difference is black is a for ‘live’ account, and orange is for a ‘test’ account. This will also be confirmed in the top right hand corner with your email address:

The Email Counter

This shows you how many free emails you have sent this month, and how many you have left this hour. This account is still new, but after sending just 63 emails the hourly limit has increased to 416 from 250.

Setting Up Access

For QuickFile to use Mandrill, you need to set up an API Key.
Select Settings > Add New API Key > Enter the details
>

And you now have an API Key:

Just before you get excited, one last thing here - go to ‘Sending Defaults’, and enable click tracking. I’d also recommend unticking the option to add an unsubscribe footer, otherwise they’ll never get your emails.

…

Giving QuickFile Access

In your QuickFile account, go to Account Settings > All Settings and Select “SMTP Settings”

Then copy the details form Mandrill to this form:

If it works, you’ll need to confirm it via QuickFile, but as the email has been sent through Mandrill, you can now see how it works.

Checking Opens and Content

In Mandrill, go to ‘Outbox’, and you’ll see the emails that’s been sent, along with the options to view the content, see Open details, and click details:

Note: The content of emails is only kept for a few days before being deleted.

Ensuring Your Email is Delivered

As if you were using the QuickFile mail server, you need to set up SPF records for Mandrill. If you go to Settings > Domains > Sending Domains, you can specify the domain there and ensure all is good. Mandrill will check these, and you help from there:

Things to Consider

• Mandrill was designed for transactional emails (e.g. password resets, order confirmations etc) - it’s not intended to be a full on mail server.
• You will be required to pay a small fee if you go over the 12,000 sending limit. This is detailed in the dashboard
• Some mail services such as Gmail disabled open tracking by the way it handles emails. However, it’s still somewhat useful
• QuickFile doesn’t directly support Mandrill. Any Mandrill queries should be checked out in their help database and through their support system

[Parker1090]

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[PeterK]

Hi Mathew, that sounds like interesting proposition/solution, let’s just see what are Glenn’s thoughts on the subject.

[Glenn]

Hi Mathew,

Thanks for the detailed post, you are right, these subjects are fairly common on the forum and regrettably the solution is not straight forward for all users. Although we have started advising some users to just set their sender address as noreply@quickfile.co.uk as a quick fix.

I’ve heard a bit about Mandrill although I have little experience using these tools myself. It looks like a very good way to track outbound emails, something that also crops up from time to time.

It would solve the problem of mail reliability, do you know however if the API has the ability to create new Mandrill accounts with QF acting as a partner? This would then give many users a very simple route to resolving these reliability issues.

[Glenn]

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[Parker1090]

Their API is quite extensive (and there’s a web hook function) - allows the use of templates too with variables passed to it, and it’ll generate the email. Effectively, you pass it one template, and a load of variables for each recipient and it does the rest.

There’s a feature there for sub accounts which could possibly be used via the API? It would mean that QuickFile bears the cost and pass it on (but in turn, the more you send, the cheaper it is. But it works out at just $14.95 for 50,000 emails, and $24.95 for 100,000. However, what I have just noticed, is since I signed up a few weeks ago, they’ve changed their pricing structure to $9.95 per month anyway, so it’s no longer free! (there is still a free trial though).

Sub account API: https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/subaccounts.JSON.html

May be worth dropping them a line?

[Glenn]

It would still work as a way to track sent mail, so there’s that! I’m only intermittently working this next week, but I will read a little bit more about this when I get back.