Transactional email needs speed. Users generally don't want to wait for their password reset information or a confirmation that their order went through, and although there are a lot of factors that can influence delivery speed, most of us expect that an email comes within a few minutes of requesting a password reset or completing an order on our favorite website. On the Mandrill side, we're doing things like adding SMTP servers around the world to speed things up for our users. Using a local Postfix server is one step you can take to help increase speed and redundancy for your emails.

My most recent post included a basic example of a plain text transactional email. I explained how even a simple email with your particular style could go a long way over something generic. Well, the message must have resonated, because one of our readers reached out that same day to share an example of a company doing exactly this... and doing it really well!

In turn, we were delighted enough to share this email with our own readers. So stick around, you might learn something!

Custom metadata is one of my favorite features in Mandrill because it's a powerful way to customize Mandrill for the unique needs of your organization, app, or website and it's simple to set up. With custom templates for metadata fields, the Activity view in your Mandrill account can display data about your emails and link directly to your CRM or backend database. read more

In his last post, Loren showed how Tourbuzz is using Mandrill's search API to show customers their email history inside of the Tourbuzz application. Of course, advanced searching is not limited to the API. It's also available inside the application. Mandrill searches utilize Lucene queries, which means you can search by a single term, phrases (surrounded with double quotes), multiple terms (using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT) and wildcards (* for multiple character wildcards and ? for single character). And by default, Mandrill searches all indexed fields, including any custom metadata that you've added. All that information is just one search field away. read more

If you use a desktop email client to create emails to be sent through Mandrill, one thing you might be missing out on is the ability to use a template or specify some custom options for the emails that you're sending. Mandrill has an awesome SMTP headers API so you can add all kinds of goodies to your emails, but desktop email clients don't generally make it simple to add these custom headers. With a little bit of wrangling, though, you'll be off and running. Below I'll show you how you can add these for a couple of popular email programs. read more