Ok, now that Connect has some serious chops in regards to creating email campaigns, there’s a glaring omission - there’s no way to track bad email addresses!
Implementation of VERP within Connect would be ideal. But if that isn’t possible, adding a reply to or bounce email address field to the Connect “Create Email Content” task would be very handy.
Working with a client that is seriously struggling with how to get a handle on this while ramping up to 10,000’s of emails a month.
Alternatively, any ideas on how to accomplish email tracking would be welcome.
Connect integrates with Mandrill natively, all you need to do is to get an account on it and you can send up to 12k emails/month for free, which includes email tracking (emails sent, received, opened, bounced, etc) and tons of other features.
Quick heads up. In v1.3 you will be able to script the sender address in order to create a unique sender address per recipient. This allows you to setup a VERP workflow.
To be honest, the Mandrill integration was nothing - it just basically set the mandrill SMTP server and asked you for a username and password. Could have done that yourself, it didn’t need integration.
For example, to send through SparkPost you can simply use their SMTP server (smtp.sparkpostmail.com) with the SSL turned on, and you’re done. Sendgrid, same thing, just use smtp.sendgrid.net instead.
“Native” support, in the case of “services that support SMTP” is a marketing gimmick. Connect can send through SMTP, thus it nativelly supports any service that accept SMTP communication - no exceptions.
I had been using other SMTP services but since there was “native” Mandrill support I thought there was something special to it. There was something special to it… marketing spin!
To be clear though, “native” support could mean something else - such as hooking into a REST API and getting a report after sending all the emails, for instance. In this case however, it is just adding the SMTP server, there is no further integration.
