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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?

Muleskinner
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1 Answers1

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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.

Kaitlin
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    Thank you for your response! After sending a mail, I render it using the Mandrill API and then store the rendered version in my database. I then retrieve the mail via a handler page for both the "view in browser" scenario and in iframes from within my webapp. – Muleskinner Feb 17 '13 at 16:55
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    The api @Muleskinner is using to render templates is https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/templates.JSON.html#method=render – alexandru.topliceanu Jul 19 '13 at 09:51
  • Interestingly, I do notice that the mandrill outbound activity page has now got a View Content link. I wonder if this is the first step to adding this functionality? – Chris O'Sullivan Oct 23 '13 at 09:36
  • Hi @ChrisO'Sullivan, the view content link has been available for several months, and as of now, no, that's not the intent. The View Content link is to allow someone logged in to the account to view the contents, but it isn't publicly available. We may offer an option when sending bulk in the future to do something like this, though. – Kaitlin Oct 24 '13 at 19:35
  • Ok, I send an email using template, but how can I get the result HTML to store it on my server? Make an additional call to render the template? – Alexey Kosov Apr 27 '15 at 15:50
  • @AlexeyKosov thats the way I do it – Muleskinner Sep 02 '15 at 09:07