Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Mandrill changing

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    #16
    Re: Mandrill changing

    @Charles,
    They may have had the plan to merge from the beginning. Get a few million using and then merge back to the parent?
    Dave Mason
    [email protected]
    Skype is dave.mason46

    Comment


      #17
      Re: Mandrill changing

      Well, I have, I think, resolved things at my end.
      We send about 90-100 emails on the weekend, and about 100 during the week.
      Quarterly, I send about 850, at one time.

      I originally started using Mandrill to avoid the client's current email 3rd party company shutting down their email for too many emails over too short a time.
      So ~ I called the the email client company, Appriver, and talked to their technical support, found what the rules are - namely not more than 65 per minute, and not over 5,000 per day.

      Although he advised me to put a sleep 2 between each one, and after maybe 10, put a sleep 30. Said I would likely be OK.

      He said when sending a lot one-at-a-time, like my client, could cause something like a stack overflow at their end - thus the sleep 30 after maybe each 10.
      So, although I will have to do some reprogramming, this will likely do it for me.
      Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
      972 524 8714
      [email protected]

      ____________________
      "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

      Comment


        #18
        Re: Mandrill changing

        Hello Martin and Steve,
        I too am a Mandrill user. I have built my business around using Mandrill. While I do not have thousands of emails to send out today, under 100 at a time, the ability to allow me to send it out in seconds flat is great. This functionality is crucial to my business. So Mandrill going to mailchimp, they not being clear on the future, and the additional cost is a concern of mine. I do see there is another service out there called SPARKPOST.

        https://www.sparkpost.com/

        Have you by any chance looked into them? It seems like they are free like Mandrill was and also they do have an API. I was thinking perhaps given your relationship with Alpha / Richard you could urge Alpha to write and release a function quickly that we developers could use to redeploy our apps to use the SPARKPOST / Alpha function. Your help and influence in this matter could be a great help to the rest of us. Your thoughts?
        Calyxte

        Comment


          #19
          Re: Mandrill changing

          Sparkspost probably works the same way as Mandrill. So unless someone beats me to it, Sparkspost integration should be as easy as Mandrill to set up.

          Disclaimer - I've never used Alpha's "integration" with Mandrill, because those features always lack full spectrum and they dilute my ability to build my own functionality. I also completely avoid any use of Alpha's "repository", which I think is part of this integration. Adding "Mandrill" to the Repository did not make sense because those services always go in and out of favor. The Mandrill Key, used in the function email_send_mandrill("mysecretkey",ms) is just the password for the Mandrill SMTP server. You can also use email_smtp_open() with all of your Mandrill account values as parameters.

          Elbee, what Mandrill feature do you use out of Alpha?
          Steve Wood
          See my profile on IADN

          Comment


            #20
            Re: Mandrill changing

            I specifically use the array feature. This way I can load up 100 emails or thousands of emails quickly. I also use that ability to customize each email to each specific user. The time it takes to upload the whole array.. ie using the email_send_mandrill("mysecretkey",ms) takes seconds VS minutes or hours using the typical smtp. I sure would love to learn how I can do the same thing using SPARKPOST. Your thoughts?

            Comment


              #21
              Re: Mandrill changing

              So in the end, someone who needs to send thousands of emails at once will use the array feature so it takes seconds, not hours to send an email. This is the functionality I need. It's a time issue as well as an ISP issue that they only allow you to send so many emails per hour.

              Comment


                #22
                Re: Mandrill changing

                Got it. It uploads and then puts them in the queue, rather than sending one at a time. I could use that feature too and will look in to it. I really like Mandrill though!
                Steve Wood
                See my profile on IADN

                Comment


                  #23
                  Re: Mandrill changing

                  FYI - there is a product up on iadn.com that will do this but use your local SMTP. It puts email in a queue, and then fires the email "offline" so it does not impact your user.

                  Direct link: http://iadn.com/store.a5w?item=REA_AUTOMAILER
                  Steve Wood
                  See my profile on IADN

                  Comment


                    #24
                    Re: Mandrill changing

                    Steve,
                    To do this with Mandrill it will cost with their new pricing at least $30/month.. While SparkPost up to 100,000 emails a month is free. For me that saves me $360/yr. Also While I would not mind paying something each month, I feel some kind of reasonable pricing from Mailchip would go a long way. Unfortunately their transactional emails are considered an additional service after having a paid for mailchimp account. Also the way they changed things over so fast does leave a bad tast in my mouth.. Anyway I wonder if how close the SPARKPOST API is to the Alpha Mandrill API. Here is an interesting link I found from SparkPost. I have not had time to really read this over.
                    https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/mandr.../#.Vt4oKPkrLol

                    Comment


                      #25
                      Re: Mandrill changing

                      Steve Link issue:
                      This web page is not available
                      Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
                      Albert Einstein, (attributed)
                      US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

                      Comment


                        #26
                        Re: Mandrill changing

                        Peter - was IP blocker, try again. Or go to http://iadn.com/store.a5w and find the REA Emailer at the bottom of the list of products.
                        Steve Wood
                        See my profile on IADN

                        Comment


                          #27
                          Re: Mandrill changing

                          Hello Steve,

                          That REA Emailer is completely NOT a replacement for using a service like Mandrill or SparkPost if one needs to send our thousands of personalized transactional emails in seconds or minutes. I presume Pete Conway had asked a question which did not show up in the forum that you were answering. The REA Emailer sends out emails one at a time, so sending out thousands would take hours and in my case that would not work.

                          By the way I did sign up for the free SparkPost account which is up to 10,000 free emails a day up to 100,000 free emails per month. What I have noticed just starting to get into it is that their service runs magnitudes faster than Mandrill. Go from menu to menu their is no 5 to 10 second pause between each one like with Mandrill. It is also way easier to understand and they got lots of videos and documents that explain how to setup ones account, how to use their system and so forth. In the end, it really may be a blessing that Mandrill is changing over because this service seems so much better already. Now just to figure out how to integrate it / use it with xbasic.

                          When you use mandrill is there away to send the parameters to Mandrill including the array information without using the API that your aware of. If so how did that work. I guess you could do that with Mandrill then once I see how that is done I could just do the same thing with SparkPost following their specifications as well. I am just not sure how it works is all. Could you point me in the right direction? Thank you. Your thoughts?

                          Comment


                            #28
                            Re: Mandrill changing

                            Didn't mean it was a complete replacement; just a local alternative. Good for small to moderate email sending.
                            Steve Wood
                            See my profile on IADN

                            Comment


                              #29
                              Re: Mandrill changing

                              Any thoughts on the rest of what i have written to you?

                              Comment


                                #30
                                Re: Mandrill changing

                                I currently use rackspace email for my host. They 'say' online that they allow 10,000 emails per day from an account. If you setup multiple email accounts you can easily get a 100,000 a day sent out.

                                Currently they charge a minimum of $20/month for 10 accounts.

                                The REA Automailer can be setup to send from different accounts in multiple ways.

                                Disclaimer: I just spent about 5 minutes reviewing the rackspace site for this info - so please review this yourself, or call them up to confirm before moving on this.
                                Earl Allin
                                REAInc.net

                                We can help you with mentoring and custom programming services in Alpha, .NET, React, PHP, ColdFusion, and more..

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X