how to send a single email

[jmagaram]

how can i use the API to send a single message to a single recipient?
i've looked through the api and don't see this. the scenario is that
the customer has lost their "product key" and requested to receive it
again. i want to send it to them via mailchimp. the product key is
stored in mailchimp as a custom field. my "Here's your product key"
message has a |*YOURKEY*| merge field. so how do i send this one
message?

[jesse]

That is not a scenario that we are built for, but we do offer psuedo-
transactional campaigns that can be used for that sort of thing:
http://www.mailchimp.com/api/examples/transactional-campaigns.php

If you go that route, just be sure to pay attention to the caveats
listed at the bottom.


jesse

[heathd]

> If you go that route, just be sure to pay attention to the caveats
> listed at the bottom.

can you elaborate on this statement:

"In general, you likely will not want to use a List with multiple
transactional campaigns. The easy solution is to add people to
multiple lists if you need to support multiple transactional campaigns
and then periodically remove users from those extra lists who have
already received the campaign. "

what will happen if you use multiple transactional campaigns on one
list? Do they interfere with each other? I have a use case where I
might want to do this so I'd really like to understand exactly what
problem this would cause?

Thanks

David

[jesse]

Yes, they will because of the previous statement on that page:
> When you send a transactional campaign, only those subscribers who have been added to the list since the campaign was created will receive it.

That's actually not as accurate as it could be, and has been updated
to:
> When you send a transactional campaign, only those subscribers who have been added to the list since the campaign was created (or since the last send, if you've started sending) will receive it.

I'm not sure if you still need that explained further, but if here's a
detailed example:

* Add user A and B to a list
* create trans campaign 1, 2, and 3
* Add user C and D to a list
* Send trans campaign 1 (goes to C & D)
* Add user E to the list
* Send trans campaign 1 (goes to E)
* Send trans campaign 2 (goes to C, D, & E)


jesse

[Pavel]

Jesse, a quick question on transactional campaigns...

* create trans campaign 1
* Add user A and B to the list
* Send trans campaign 1 (goes to A & B)

* remove everyone from the list
* Add user A and B to the list
* Send trans campaign 1 (goes to A & B)

Does the last item look correct?

Best Regards,
Pavlo V. Lysov

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[jesse]

Pavlo -
Yes, that's exactly how that will work.


jesse

[tybro0103]

So how does this work when you need to notify a user of a certain
event on your website... in particular, what if you need to notify
them of the same event twice? (It says you can use it to send a
password-forgotten email... what if my stupid user forgets their
password twice?)

[jesse]

The basic usage of trans campaigns is laid out about as clearly as
possible above in this thread. To resend the same campaign to the same
user you'll need to unsubscribe them and resubscribe them to the list
before the send.


jesse

[Tyler Brown]

Thanks Jesse,

Does MailChimp have any plans to better support emails that are more notification-like rather than campaign-like? I really love MailChimp's reporting features. I'd hate to have to use Message Pub.

[jesse]

No, we don't - if you keep looking, most places call them
transactional emails, which may be helpful in your searches.


jesse

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