Mandrill is a service provided by Mailchimp.

Mandrill is purely for handling the sending of e-mails; it just acts as the SMTP server.

Mailchimp is a service that allows you to manage mailing lists and quickly allow people to subscribe/unsubscribe whilst giving the ability to non-technical people to send out e-mails out to those people quickly and easily through pre-built templates.

Mailchimp used Mandril to actually send the e-mails, just like you do.

Does that clear things up?

jayhealey said:

Mandrill is a service provided by Mailchimp.

Mandrill is purely for handling the sending of e-mails; it just acts as the SMTP server.

Mailchimp is a service that allows you to manage mailing lists and quickly allow people to subscribe/unsubscribe whilst giving the ability to non-technical people to send out e-mails out to those people quickly and easily through pre-built templates.

Mailchimp used Mandril to actually send the e-mails, just like you do.

Does that clear things up?

Hey thanks for this.

That is good news. Because I am in charge of all users and emails and all I do is automated scripts. I dont need Mailchimp then :)

So much work off my shoulders.

Thanks

Just make sure your email list adhears to legal regulations such as the can spam act and you are fine.

When managing a mailing list and you need to get into many peoples inboxes all at once, you should use Mailchimp. Since Mandrill has a set quota per time-period that you can send out, once you have a few hundred or thousand subscribers and you are emailing them regularly, Mailchimp is the way to go to manage that and keep up with regulations.

Mandrill is for transactional email. This is one-off things. Highly targeted to a certain user or action on your site.

Also afaik Mailchimp does not use Mandrill to send emails. They use the same infrastructure service but are different setups. That is unless they have done more integration lately.