mandrill-codecademy

Mandrill webhooks troubleshooting

mandrill webhooksThis article provides advices for easier testing on custom applications integrated with Mandrill Webhooks.

Mandrill is transactional email platform created from the popular email subscription ‘newsletter’ service Mailchimp. Mandrill is competitor of services like Sendgrid, Mailjet and etc. By far is the cheapest and most flexible solution out there. Furthermore due the fact that it is relatively new it still gets new features every day.

 

 

Mandrill supports two ways for sending emails:

On the other end there are Mandrill Webhooks. 

Mandrill Webhooks pushes events (send, open, click) back to chosen from you URL. That makes possible for you to keep track on the email status.

Two things about Mandrill Webhooks that is nice to know in advance:

  • They don’t support email ‘delivery’ event.
  • All events are normally fired with 7-10 minutes delay.

Test Mandrill Webhooks in couple easy steps:

1. Save all possible RAW HTTP requests that Mandrill can send.

Use RequestBin for that.

RequestBin  provides you with temporary URL on which you can submit HTTP requests.  On the same RequestBin URL you will be able to preview all the submitted requests.

requestbin

2. Import the requests in Postman.

Postman is extremely cool and easy Google Chrome Extension. It is used for testing REST web services and ordinary HTTP requests.

The nice really thing about this solution in comparison with APIKitchen and Hurl is the possibility to store and order your request structure.

As user interface Postman resembles Hurl. Besides the ordinary Parameter/Value input that you can have in both Hurl and Postman, in Postman there is also possibility to use ‘Raw’ requests. This functionality is really handy when you need to copy already existing query source from RequestBin, for example. Unfortunately the syntax of the Raw request is often harder to comprehend. Furthermore unfortunately the Form-data (Parameter/Value) and the ‘Raw’ data are not synchronized.  Therefore if values are added in both tabs you will end up with two completely different requests.

postman

You can use this apps for all kind of developing, testing or debugging. They will definitely safe you hours during the process.