There will be occasion that your WordPress appears to be running okay but it just couldn’t send emails. For example, you may have a WordPress subscription site and when your users signed up, system is supposed to send some notification emails – it appears normal but no email is sent. This could be a problem of your WordPress/PHP mail not working.

Of course, the best way to resolve this is to fix the PHP/server side. But there’s another quick, easy and rather good way to get this solve – with Mandrill.

Mandrill is developed and brought to you by one of the best autoresponder provider MailChimp. It is an email infrastructure service designed to help applications or websites that need to send transactional email like password resets, order confirmations, and welcome messages. It supports SMTP integration which allows you to bypass the usual WordPress/PHP mailing method to use its API to send emails via Mandrill.

Mandrill is now the largest Email as a Service platform on the market, with more than 375,000 active customers. The pricing structure of Mandrill is a total surprise – free for first 12,000 emails every month. For newbie, that means it’s literally free. After that (12,000 emails), every thousand emails sent is just a mere $0.20 (up to the first million emails). Now if you have so many subscribers to send to, such cost is only peanuts.

The cool thing is Mandrill integrates very nicely with GMail SMTP.