[dangrossman]

MailChimp is designed for sending newsletters to predefined lists, not bulk mail in general. They're not the same thing.

If you've built a monitoring tool that needs to notify 5 employees that their server has just gone down, you needed Mandrill, not MailChimp. These mails are "transactional" the same way a password reset is: they're programmatic responses to some event. They're also bulk, and if all 5 employees get the same message, now prohibited.

Mandrill was always for programmatic mail of any kind, not just one-to-one. Bulk mail was all over their sales material and knowledgebase. The context that separated Mandrill from MailChimp was that the mail is programmatic or automatic, rather than a newsletter you pre-write for a pre-made list. Their raison d’être was to provide reliable e-mail delivery for developers, regardless of what you were sending, up until last week.

[vram22]

Good explanation of the difference, thanks.