Move transactional mail

[adavidramos]

MailChimp is repositioning Mandrill as "MailChimp Transactional." They promise strong, accessible features that'd be valuable for ecommerce providers (which might include us), but the price increases to a minimum of $20/month, which seems dauntingly high.

More on the change

We'll need an answer by the transition date, 27 April 2016. Possible approaches:

1. Stay with MailChimp. We'll need to move the account itself. The new MailChimp will also need SPF/DKIM records, so we'll have to add them for knowledgecommonsdc.org. That means we'll have to change the way that we send accommodation request emails (they come from the student's email address).
2. Move to Amazon SES.
3. Move to SparkPost, which is free for up to 100,000 messages/month (Mandrill migration guide).

We could also do the updates necessary to stay with MailChimp for a few months, then move on to a new, less expensive provider.

[adavidramos]

One important consideration: we're sending mail using Djrill, making calls within Django, rather than through SMTP. Our experience with SMTP was poor, at least if you value the delivery of messages.

[adavidramos]

We are staying on Mandrill for the time being. The service will remain free for us for twelve months, through 27 April 2017.

Mandrill is linked to our MailChimp account. SPF and DKIM records for Mandrill are set up on knowledgecommonsdc.org.

As best as I can tell, MailChimp should be able to send newsletters under contact@knowledgecommonsdc.org without further configuration and, indeed, generally does not expect SPF/DKIM. I've started to set up the DNS settings for MailChimp anyway, but I paused. Mandrill DNS changes were time-sensitive and I wanted them to propagate.

We are sending Gmail as knowledgecommonsdc@gmail.com. This is icky, but getting SPF/DKIM working for Gmail is involved and poorly documented. It might require moving to Google Apps for Business.