AppSheet: Migrating remaining customers from Mandrill email channel to 'System Default' before May 27, 2021 (Thurs)

Hi AppSheet Community!

Note: This change only impacts a small subset of our AppSheet customers that are still using ‘System Mandrill’ as their default email channel. These customers have already been notified of this upcoming change.

On May 27, 2021 (Thurs), we will update the email provider from ‘System Mandrill’ to ‘System Default’ for the remaining customers that have not migrated yet. The customers impacted by this change have already been notified of this upcoming change.

For the customers that are still using ‘System Mandrill’, please test your workflows using the “Test” button. Please verify that your mails are being sent as expected and tweak templates so emails look as expected with the new email provider. Once verified, switch the email provider to ‘System Default’ and notify us. Also, see screenshots below.

Call to action:

  1. Please click the “Test” button pictured below (under Behavior or Automation) to test how your templates appear. The “Test” button will always use the ‘System Default’ channel to send email.

  1. After verifying that your tests work as expected, please change the default ‘Via channel’ option pictured below to ‘System Default’.

  1. We do not anticipate any impact of this change to your emails since the majority of our customers are already running the ‘System Default’ email provider. However, if you do run into any formatting issues, please adjust your email templates.

For any questions related to this change, please contact AppSheet Support.

Thanks for being an AppSheet Customer.

Best Regards,

AppSheet (Connectors)

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6 REPLIES 6

Hi @Scott_Haaland

I have explicitely set the email provide to Mandrill for all the production apps before, just because we have forced to do so to stay with Mandrill to avoid some interuptions of new mail services. Now I understand we need to once again expliciately change it over to default service, but I wonder the mandrill service will become no longer available after 27th May?

@Takuya_Miyai

Hi @tsuji_koichi ,

Yes, that is correct. The plan is that Mandrill will not be available after May 27th. Please follow the instructions to test your emails and then migrate your apps to the “System Default”.

R,
Scott

Jamie
Participant V

I’m really concerned about this timeline.

First, this announcement should really be pinned. From the few posts I have read, there are still many people having issues with the new default email handler and they have punted the change just like me, because it is a huge pain in the neck for something that does not give us any benefit as far as I can tell. I just happened to have a few minutes over the weekend and was looking around for any interesting news when I came upon this announcement. My stomach dropped.

Second, the “Test” button in Automation / Bot tab does not preview my message body template, it tests the logical conditions and then offers me an “Exceute” button but I am not sure what happens if I click that. My guess is nothing since I have gating conditions which control the entire Bot/Process/Task execution which would all evaluate to false. Ignoring the inaccuracy of the suggested test procedure, if I do my own testing using my App, the “System Default” engine adds a phantom attachment to every single email which appears to be a copy of my product logo which is embedded in the header of all my 80+ message body templates. This does not happen in Mandrill and I don’t have the time to troubleshoot this, never mind go through and update every single template. Again, this change offers me no benefits, only a new problem and extra work that I had not planned nor do I have time to do.

I will open a case with support to try to offload this issue to them, but in the past they have had limited success helping me troubleshoot complex formatting issues with email body templates and it has been up to me to spend literally days doing trial and error tests on 8 different email clients and platforms.

In summary, I think you are minimizing the potential impact this change has to the community and your assurance of “We do not anticipate any impact of this change to your emails […]” is not very reassuring to me personally based on my past experience. I personally see no benefit to this change and for something that is so impactful and potentially embarrassing as messing up the carefully crafted formatting of bulk emails, I think you need to be much more understanding of our position and work proactively to resolve these issues before throwing that kill switch.

Hi @Jamie ,

Thanks for your feedback. I completely understand your hesitancy to make this change and apologize for the short notice period. We’ve been working with customers to resolve most of these issues for about 6 months now and have gotten them all to a successful conclusion. Would you be willing to report a support ticket for the dangling attachment issue you noted here, and we can have someone in engineering help you debug that? Ask the support person to tag me “shaaland”, and I’ll make sure we follow up with this.

Thanks for your patience and understanding!

R,
Scott

Thanks for this, @Scott_Haaland - I opened a support case yesterday and am working on it with them. I provided screenshots and details and was just told that there would be an update to Chime so that it would match the expected behavior. Not very specific, but it sounds like it will be resolved so I look forward to seeing that.

BTW, I did report this originally back in January when the new email processor made its debut, and was told at the time that a fix was in progress:

So please excuse me if I panicked a bit when I saw the new deadline announcement.

No worries at all @Jamie . We all understand how difficult these transitions can be, and we’re doing our best to minimize impact!! Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, and I see in your support ticket that you have the best engineer for this issue already working on it, so you are in good hands.

Thanks,
Scott