Mandrill and view in browser functionality

Question

Anyone know if Mandrill support a "View in browser" functionality like the MailChimp |ARCHIVE| variable. If not, can I use the search functionality to fetch a send mail (for example if I know some specific metadata for the mail in question)? Or would I have to render the template and store it myself for later retrieval?

Answer 1

The best bet is to store a copy on your server that you can link to from within an email when it makes sense, such as for bulk emails. The ARCHIVE merge tag isn't supported in Mandrill automatically, as that's specific for a campaign in MailChimp that may be sent to a large number of recipients at once. Storing a single copy for thousands of recipients is fairly straightforward. Mandrill, though, tracks every individual email you send, so it would require a single unique copy of every email to be stored in a way that' publicly-accessible, which adds up to extremely large amounts of data storage (and data storage costs and overhead).

We're also aware that a lot of transactional email is highly personalized and may contain confidential information, so creating a publicly-accessible version of each email doesn't make sense in a lot of cases.

Email contents can be viewed within your account for 24 hours after an email is sent, but the contents aren't accessible longer-term and they're not available via the API (more info in the Mandrill KB here about viewing contents). For more general info about how long data is stored, here's a bit more here about that.