[Plugin: wpMandrill] Why mess with formatting?

It probably has something to do with sending “through Mandrill, a transactional email service powered by MailChimp”, and apparently things are “automatically tagged for statistics within the Mandrill Dashboard”. The ‘tagging’ process is where I’d guess your formatting goes awry.

I think you are trying to use this plugin for something it isn’t meant for, or maybe use a service when you don’t need to. This is not equivalent to using an SMTP plugin. An SMTP plugin will use your host’s mail server to send email, which is fine for a lot of purposes like user registration, password resets… that kind of thing. However, most hosts I’ve dealt with do not allow sending bulk email like newsletters using their servers. For that you need to use a service like MailChimp. Looks like you can send quite a bit of email over their service so that could be a benefit but I think the key to this plugin is the “transactional email” part:

Transactional e-mail is a type of Web-based marketing in which e-mail recipients can buy goods and services directly from an e-mail message, without being redirected to the retailer’s Web site. According to proponents, transactional e-mail leads to significantly higher conversion rates – the ratio of shoppers to buyers, which goes up when the former is converted to the latter – than regular e-mail marketing approaches. A number of different transactional e-mail products are available, from Cybuy, Radical Communication, and EActive, among others.

https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/transactional-e-mail

And that does imply bulk email.

Thanks for the time you put in to explain this; however, I am actually using this plugin for the purpose intended. I am offloading bulk email to Mandrill’s transactional email service so bulk email sends are easily tracked and not handled through the host (which also increases the chance the mail gets sent to the SPAM box).

Because this plugin is supposed to catch all email sent via wpmail() – which in itself will include registrations, password resets, etc., one would hope it would not mess with any of the formatting already being passed to wpmail() – instead it would just send it exactly as it gets it (with the understanding that it might add some tags for tracking purposes).

…one would hope it would not mess with any of the formatting already being passed to wpmail() – instead it would just send it exactly as it gets it (with the understanding that it might add some tags for tracking purposes).

I really doubt that the plugin is purposely altering existing formatting, but programmatically altering markup is pretty tricky.

Hello,

The process to generate the content parts of the emails is something like this:

– The plugin receives your content once wp_mail is used.
– The process use this content as the HTML part of a email.
– The process generates the TEXT part of the email based on the HTML part.

Optionally, if you have clicked on the NL-to-BR switch, it will replace every New Line character for a BR HTML tag. This is probably the part that is messing with your content.

So the advice is:

If you are sending HTML content, left that NL-to-BR unchecked.

If you are sending PLAIN content (WP default), check that switch.

If you have a mix of HTML and PLAIN emails, leave the switch unchecked and use the filter to create the appropriate content (if you set a TEXT part for your email, it won’t be overwritten).

I hope it helps!