Set up a Mailchimp Transactional sending domain
Distinguish Mandrill credentials from Mailchimp campaigns and complete transactional domain authentication before sending.
Reviewed
Mailchimp Transactional, historically Mandrill, is not Mailchimp’s campaign API. Its account requirements, credentials, sending interfaces, and webhook conventions must be configured for the Transactional product specifically.
Prepare a transactional identity
- Enable the appropriate Transactional service for your Mailchimp account under its current eligibility rules.
- Add and authenticate the application sending domain with the supplied DNS records.
- Create a Transactional API credential and store it only on the application backend.
- Choose test versus live operation explicitly. A test key/sandbox result must not be represented as a delivered production message.
The official fundamentals explain product access, domain setup, API/SMTP, and test mode. Do not copy a campaign API key or marketing audience ID into a transactional sending example.
Verify the intended account
Run a controlled test, inspect Transactional activity, and check the recipient for a live send. Record which domain and account own the credential and any subaccount isolation used by the application.
For failures, distinguish product access, domain authentication, credential, and recipient rejection. Adding a recipient to a marketing audience is not a general prerequisite for a transactional password-reset message.
MailKite can be used independently for application sending or receiving, but a Mailchimp Transactional key cannot authenticate its APIs. Preserve the routing and credential boundary during migration.