https://www.hire-experts.com/social-engine/newsletter-updates-plugin
The above Plugin description shows Mailchimp under 'Email Services Supported', but you will obviously have to contact them to see how it's integrated to determine if it will function as needed.
==> '(still nothing from them)'
Have you used the contact form on their website? In my experience, it sometimes takes 2-3 days to reply. Support is handled very quickly since they use a ticketing system once you're a client, but pre-sales may take a little longer (which may be frustrating, but as a client I'd rather have them prioritize support and customizations over sales).
I use Sendgrid for transactional and campaign sends. I use AgileCRM for the campaigns and drip sequences.
- A member signs up for our site, during verification process their information gets manually copied to AgileCRM
- AgileCRM (which I use Sendgrid with) puts them into a campaign and they go through the selected email drip.
This way as they interact with the drip campaign I can segregate them via tags due to actions taken etc.
What I would like to see is an upgrade to the mail system inside SocialEngine. Sendgrid is who we also use and while SMTP is fine, it would be nice to move to their API. It would allow more secure services and would provide more flexibility for Developers. Being able to create a module that would pull user information based on last login, or any other metrics would be amazing for targeted mail, however, SendGrid would highly prefer this be done via their API. Just a thought.
We can't do anything with Sendgrid to upgrade or add a feature as Sendgrid announced last year that they don't take social networks. Sparkpost did the same. Though we use it and I use it and many clients use it, it will become more unreliable over time once they start cracking down on these sort of sites. It does work with smtp though so no need to change things.
==> 'We can't do anything with Sendgrid to upgrade or add a feature as Sendgrid announced last year that they don't take social networks'
Does anyone have a link to this information/announcement? I'm in the process of selecting the provider for transactional email and I don't want to rule out Sendgrid, but rather would like to discuss this with them and point to their own policy in the discussion. I'd like to find out from them why they'd pick on social networks specifically. Maybe calling it an online community would make a difference :) (pls read that as sarcasm)
I am in the process of speaking to them as we speak. I am colleagues with the Business Development Director. I am using SendGrid currently for my SE site with 60K members and they fully support me using it, so I am unsure of that this means from Donna.
@Donna, do you have a link or information about why they dont take social networks overall?
FM Ryan said:
I am in the process of speaking to them as we speak. I am colleagues with the Business Development Director. I am using SendGrid currently for my SE site with 60K members and they fully support me using it, so I am unsure of that this means from Donna.
@Donna, do you have a link or information about why they dont take social networks overall?
I don't think I have the link now. All of these sort of services stopped taking social networks due to the amount of email going out. It is possible they allow it for their business plans though. Best is to contact them as you are doing.
FM Ryan said:
I spoke to them today. I am getting a link from them but about 18 months they changed a series of rules and do allow social networks. The point they stress is you need to be on a paid plan if you are using it in production. The main reason for this is you get a dedicated IP that won’t impact the scores of other clients.
Great! Thanks for posting that. It must be just for those free plans then like you said. I had mine on a free plan.
To clarify, it isn't just their free plans. Any plan that uses a SHARED IP, they "strongly encourage" you to use their more robust plans that include a static IP. Again, this depends on your traffic and bounce rates. If you handle 100,000 emails/month and only a 1-2% email issue percentage, they generally don't care. The issue is, and we all do it, we put those emails into our spam folder because we just don't want to deal with it and its too much work to login to a site to change notifications. This in turn changes the rating of the IP Origin.
What I did was start with a free plan for a month or 2 and then went to a 10$ plan for a few months and slowly worked into a more robust plan. I was told that was acceptable because of how I handled it. I hope all this helps someone figure out how to move forward with their transactional email needs.
PS, I strongly suggest using SOMETHING other than mail() or a local SMTP server, for $10-$25/month you can save yourself hours of headache for nothing trying to manage your own mail server, even if it is just SMTP.
Whew... now that makes sense. I couldn't see how a business that gets paid for something would prevent sites from paying them for what they do. Why be in the business of selling hamburgers if you're not going to let someone buy them?
Most of the transactional email services have very inexpensive plans.
This goes along with the need to better easily control/limit emails from SE. Hopefully that will be one of the early FRs SE finally takes up after 4.10 is released.