Just curious...re: email links

[Core]

Not a thing, really, but I got curious. When I receive an email notification from the site, every link to pcreview.co.uk. is prefixed with "http://mandrillapp.com/track/click/....". For example: "http://mandrillapp.com/track/click/30539620/www.pcreview.co.uk?p=[string]".

So basically it goes through mandrillapp.com first and they redirect me to where I am really going. I guess it's for either site traffic analytics or advertising revenue, somehow. I am fine with both, just curious.

 

[Ian]

Good question! Because there are so many e-mails sent each day from the server (thread notifications, PM alerts, etc...) we've off-loaded email sending to an external server (Mandrill.com) - it offloads lots of processing and means the server runs more efficiently .

All of the links are then converted to the mandrill domain when we pass them over, as it provides details on percentage of links clicked. TBH, I never use these stats so I'll happy disable them if it's easy to do (I seem to remember it required extra domain verification when I last looked, but I think I've done that anyway now). We don't get any ad revenue from Mandrill (we have to pay them a small amount each month), as it's just a transactional email service.

Another big plus for offloading email to Mandrill is that they offer spam tracking. If anyone ever clicks "spam" in webmail on one of our e-mails, it has a big effect on the reputation of the site in the eyes of mail providers. If it happens too many times then they can block our domain. Sometimes people click spam instead of unsubscribe if they get email notifications for a thread they posted a long time ago, so the forum software can now detect this and make sure they don't get any more emails from the site to compound the problem.

 

[muckshifter]

... but I got curious.

good question ... now we all know the answer.

 

[Core]

That's a cool system. Thanks for shining more light on how it all works!

 

[Anon_F]

Now this is interesting, because I keep getting a lot of emails from MailChimp which is part of Mandrill?

 

[Ian]

Now this is interesting, because I keep getting a lot of emails from MailChimp which is part of Mandrill?

Yep, MailChimp and Mandrill are the same company - although MailChimp is for Newsletters I think.