Some people pointed out that SES appears to be (mostly) a transactional email service. In case you don’t know, transactional messages are usually one-to-one “system” notifications (examples include account setup emails, password reminder emails, purchase receipts, shipping notifications, etc). There’s a good techie discussion over at Hacker News about all this.

Other people wondered out loud how this might affect ESPs like MailChimp, who specialize in sending one-to-many messages. Did Amazon just make it extremely easy for programmers to develop a competing email delivery service?

“What does MailChimp think of all this?”

Honestly, our first thought was something like, “Aaaaaah sh*t.” But immediately after that, our second thought was, “Oh sh*t! This is awesome. Amazon just saved us a boat load of work!”

(We kinda have a habit of quickly embracing change here at MailChimp)

So we got to work creating an integration between Amazon SES and the MailChimp API. We quietly launched it 2 days ago, along with all our other redesign and pricing changes.

We’re calling it MailChimp STS (Simple Transactional Service)

What does MailChimp STS do?

Think of Email Service Providers (ESPs) as cars. Some of us are peppy and sporty and economical, while others are big stretched-limousine SUVs with chrome wheels and chauffeurs named Jeeves.

And Amazon SES is basically like an engine. For now, you can only use it via their API, and you still have to build everything around that engine: the chassis, suspension, steering, brakes, roof, airbags, cupholder and iPod dock.

Our integration lets you use Amazon’s delivery engine for transactional messages, but overlays some MailChimpy features to make things more convenient.

Features that we add on top of using Amazon SES:

1. Slightly simpler API
2. Opens and click tracking
3. Visual reports (all pretty and stuff) dashboard to see stats
4. We keep more than 2 weeks of history, showing hourly stats for at least 6 months.
5. You can tag your transactional messages with custom labels (up to 100), and see your stats filtered by tag (say, one for receipts and one for confirmation messages)
6. We’ll automate some of the SES limitations – if you exceed your daily or hourly quota by a small amount, we’ll queue the message for you and try to send it later.  If you send from an address you haven’t verified, we’ll again queue the message and automatically send the verification request.

How much does it cost?

Our integration is free. You just pay Amazon’s fees for delivery.

Can anybody use this?

Because this is so new, and because we really want to prevent abuse, this is only going to be available to our paying customers for the foreseeable future. Amazon has their own built-in measures to prevent abuse (and protect their deliverability), but we want to limit access to customers who’ve been through our approval process, and have been through the Omnivore wringer. We already have one customer switching over now (they previously used some workarounds with our API), and we hope to post a case study of that soon.

How do I get started?

Just to set expectations, this stuff is for nerds. You’ll need to be comfy programming stuff with our API.

• Technical Overview in the MailChimp Knowledge Base
• MailChimp STS API docs

• Welcome/Sign-up emails for your website or mailing list
• Follow-up/Reminder emails
• Forgotten Password emails

This all happens through the magic of our API, or Application Programming Interface, which is essentially a set of code that allows MailChimp to interact with other applications.  Not a programmer?  The API is for nerds only.  If you can’t call a function or find a programmer in your company to bribe, you can always contact one of our MailChimp Experts.

Since you’ve decided to set up a Transactional Email Campaign, the next question is HOW?

1. Create a new List via the web interface
2. Configure any Merge Vars or Interest groups for the List – this can be done via the API or the web interface
3. Use the campaignCreate() method to create your campaign. Be sure to use a type of “trans“
4. Now just rinse & repeat…
   1. Call listSubscribe() for each email address. Note that if you’d like, it is perfectly reasonable to add multiple addresses before sending.
   2. Call campaignSendNow() to send to everyone who has not received this before
5. Done!

The documentation for campaignCreate() method can be found here.  Also, take a look at the more in-depth technical overview information for some additional caveats and things to note about MailChimp’s Transactional Email Campaigns.