Self-hosted, works with Amazon SES. I have many clients that send many thousands of messages using the cheapest of Bluehost shared hosting accounts, when you also use Amazon SES as the mail service. (Things like Board of Realtors groups that post realty available to a discussion list)
I was looking for something like this. The perl code is quite easy to follow. Nice project!
I will try and install it on webfaction and provide feedback for you to add to your docs. :)
Another alternative: SendGrid recently released a much less expensive product [1] which shares most features with MailChimp. Contact storage costs $20 per month for a typical list of 20,000 subscribers (for comparison, storing the same number of contacts at MailChimp would be $150/mo).
We handle deliverability issues ourselves, so you won't have to maintain the reputation of a self-hosted solution. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my email's in my profile.
I love SendGrid, Mailgun, etc. but they are not replacements for marketing-friendly ESPs. Marketing ESPs need easy UIs for email composition, segmenting, workflows, database modifications, reporting, etc.
In case of Mailtrain, Sendy, MailWizz et al. you do not send messages directly but through a paid relay, so the blacklisting is not an issue. The price is usually quite low, for example using Amazon SES costs about $100 for million messages. If the volume is low as well, then several providers have generous free tiers available (SparkPost offers 100k free messages/month), so it might not cost anything at all. SaaS providers offer convenience – you do not have to install, maintain or upgrade anything, "it just works" but in the end most of these use also a relay provider like Amazon SES to do the actual delivery
That is true, to a certain extent. However, if you're willing/able to use Amazon SES, you can save a huge amount of money, while having comparable deliverability. Of course, with deliverability, there are no guarantees. Some email services do worse than self-hosted email, some do better.
For most people with smaller lists (say 20k), the cost savings is not that significant. But, if you have a large list, providers such as Mailchimp are prohibitively expensive.
I think the same of you. Mail marketing is really difficult. That's why we don't have lots of competitors, and this is why (I believe) Mailchimp is so expensive.
It's the year 2016. It's ridiculous to not have tests. Why even run it? You can't change it and be sure you didn't break something/anything without testing in production.
HN, thanks for this thread. I was looking for a self-hosted email newsletter solution for ages, but couldn't really find good ones. The often claimed value proposition of deliverabiliy of all the big names is a myth IMHO, at least in Germany. All the big brand names ALWAYS get put into my spam folder (GMX). Deliverability is more than Gmail lets it pass.
I used a Wordpress Plugin called MyMail for a while, but updating Wordpress is annoying and I'm always afraid that the plugin changes in some way that it breaks.
I will check out the suggested solutions here, but if anyone knows from the top of his head which satisfies these requirements, I'd really appreciate it:
- self-hosted (obviously)
- must be able to use any SMTP server
- preferrably bounce handling via IMAP
- double opt-in, which also can be disabled
- basic API support (subscribe, unsubscribe)
- one click unsubscribe
- Autoresponder capabilities (nice would be: lets me set the specific time of delivery. Say: +1 day after signup at 11am)
- reasonably fast UI
Not required:
- multi-tenant
- template builder
- fancy templates (I will use a very basic email layout)
- GeoIP
- CRM capabilities
I tried Mautic (https://www.mautic.org/) which looked promising, but the UI is so horribly slow, it annoyed me. I don't want to wait 5 seconds for every HTTP request to complete. Especially if I need to set up my email campaigns
Well, deliverability and being self-hosted might not go well together these days. There is a LOT you need to go in terms of setting up the relevant infrastructure; the newsletter software is just a tiny fragment of it. And even if your carefully crafted infrastructure works now, it can suddenly stop, just because some big e-mail hosting service decides they implement a major change (see e.g.: http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp-res...).
Mailwizz has all the features you want, plus is multi-tenant, has extensions support and can be hosted for cheap. I'm running it on Webfaction for $10/m.
Does anyone know of an open source Mandrill clone, preferably self-hosted? Finding someone to do newsletters or simply doing via traditional mailing-list software is pretty easy, but finding an alternative for Mandrill is a bit harder.
We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone else would already have done.
We're building a self-hosted service similar to Mandrill for bulk and transactional email on https://highrisehq.com. Mandrill was the only service that offered unlimited sub-accounts each with their own reputation and quota. We relied on that to offer bulk email to our customers, and since there’s no good alternative we need to build it in-house. In addition to sub-accounts & quota management, we needed open+click analytics, templates, and a fast RPC api. We also don’t want an email provider going dark on us again, so it’ll support sending from a pool of email providers. Mailgun is the one we’re using first (it’s been great so far) then likely SES.
We’re going to open source it at some point. It’s written in Go with a Postgres backend so deployment is straight forward — should be able to get decent mileage off a single Heroku dyno. I look forward to sharing more soon!
We looked down this path, but ultimately just didn't want to be responsible for SMTP servers.
Now we're with Sparkpost, the rate was actually a touch cheaper (by maybe a few hundred a month on a several thousand dollar bill). There are plenty of features they don't have (or don't have working correctly when we tried):
* Css inlining, we opted for doing this ourselves after trying theirs.
* Account sending limits. With mandrill this was managed based on our usage, with Sparkpost, it needs to be manually adjusted through support (hint: you also need to monitor this, they won't warn you if you near limits).
* Tagging of emails is different, less searchable but generally its better in some ways and worse in others.
This is really cool! If anyone is interested in easily making a CRM tool to do similar things around list management and bulk mailing (and want control on your environment/stack), I wrote a blogpost on it: http://blog.varunarora.com/how-i-made-a-crm-in-3-hours/
The page you see at mailtrain.org is what you get once you install and run the Mailtrain software from GitHub - it's not a homepage, it is an actual Mailtrain installation that I use to send out my newsletters
I can't compare, but I can comment on Sendy. I use it to send about to a list of about 5k.
It has never sent to completion on its own, it always requires me to monitor the queue so I can hit the 'retry' button once it times out which usually happens after about 100-150 emails have been sent. I've actually scripted this action - so now when I send, I hit the send button as well as fire off a shell script that spoofs the 'refresh' request. It takes about 10 minutes to complete the campaign.
I'll echo the other complaints about the quality of the code - it seems to suffer from a copy / paste syndrome as the database connection logic is repeated in every file, but it could also be that the author has obfuscated it as well. It does do a phone home and some other stuff via some base 64 encoded code. I've unwound it in an attempt to fix another issue I thought it was causing (it wasn't). Here it is if you are curious:
I'll give Sendy credit for getting me this far, though I would like to replace it someday with something I feel I have more control over. Not sure the OP or the other suggestions listed here offer exactly what I'm looking for.
I am the phpList community manager. Anyone used phpList before? We're Open Source (AGPL specifically).
We offer phpList as a hosted service on phpList.com. It's the same code (AGPL) but we deal with deliverability, updates etc. Our clients range from 300 mails a month (free) to high volume senders on VPS with millions of subscribers and mails :)
Yes I did, as self-hosted and for very low volume. Thank you for being part of this project.
However, I stopped using it because of user-experience issues. Interface was not clear and efficient enough, especially when working with templates. Last point, design seemed a bit outdated.
[+] [-] justinator|10 years ago|reply
Self-hosted, works with Amazon SES. I have many clients that send many thousands of messages using the cheapest of Bluehost shared hosting accounts, when you also use Amazon SES as the mail service. (Things like Board of Realtors groups that post realty available to a discussion list)
[+] [-] the-dude|10 years ago|reply
I have known your project for a very long time now.
Have you ever considered offering it as a SaaS ? Why not?
[+] [-] bliti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wprapido|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etjossem|10 years ago|reply
We handle deliverability issues ourselves, so you won't have to maintain the reputation of a self-hosted solution. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my email's in my profile.
[1] https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-marketing
Disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.
[+] [-] homero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andris9|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobJans|10 years ago|reply
For most people with smaller lists (say 20k), the cost savings is not that significant. But, if you have a large list, providers such as Mailchimp are prohibitively expensive.
[+] [-] edpichler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|10 years ago|reply
> Alpha-grade software. Might or might not work as expected. Awful code base, needs refactoring. No tests. No documentation.
[+] [-] Xeoncross|10 years ago|reply
Fills a need. Everything else sucks.
[+] [-] whatnotests|10 years ago|reply
It's the year 2016. It's ridiculous to not have tests. Why even run it? You can't change it and be sure you didn't break something/anything without testing in production.
> No documentation.
The 1990s called. They want their code back.
[+] [-] WA|10 years ago|reply
I used a Wordpress Plugin called MyMail for a while, but updating Wordpress is annoying and I'm always afraid that the plugin changes in some way that it breaks.
I will check out the suggested solutions here, but if anyone knows from the top of his head which satisfies these requirements, I'd really appreciate it:
Not required: I tried Mautic (https://www.mautic.org/) which looked promising, but the UI is so horribly slow, it annoyed me. I don't want to wait 5 seconds for every HTTP request to complete. Especially if I need to set up my email campaigns[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slig|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|10 years ago|reply
We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone else would already have done.
[+] [-] michaeldwan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verelo|10 years ago|reply
Now we're with Sparkpost, the rate was actually a touch cheaper (by maybe a few hundred a month on a several thousand dollar bill). There are plenty of features they don't have (or don't have working correctly when we tried):
* Css inlining, we opted for doing this ourselves after trying theirs.
* Account sending limits. With mandrill this was managed based on our usage, with Sparkpost, it needs to be manually adjusted through support (hint: you also need to monitor this, they won't warn you if you near limits).
* Tagging of emails is different, less searchable but generally its better in some ways and worse in others.
[+] [-] slig|10 years ago|reply
Main differences: built using a PHP framework, has extensions support, works on SES and competitors and is cheaper.
[+] [-] lemonade|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobJans|10 years ago|reply
Thank you!
[+] [-] 2pointsomone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andris9|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aioprisan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinky07|10 years ago|reply
From the Call-to-actions on the website, to the mass mailing and statistics on emails. (with a good email template composer)
[+] [-] jonathanbull|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t3ra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shocks|10 years ago|reply
Functionality wise, it seems the same.
ninja edit: it made me sick because it was ugly, didn't feel secure, and it took me ages to make the changes I needed to make.
[+] [-] fowkswe|10 years ago|reply
It has never sent to completion on its own, it always requires me to monitor the queue so I can hit the 'retry' button once it times out which usually happens after about 100-150 emails have been sent. I've actually scripted this action - so now when I send, I hit the send button as well as fire off a shell script that spoofs the 'refresh' request. It takes about 10 minutes to complete the campaign.
I'll echo the other complaints about the quality of the code - it seems to suffer from a copy / paste syndrome as the database connection logic is repeated in every file, but it could also be that the author has obfuscated it as well. It does do a phone home and some other stuff via some base 64 encoded code. I've unwound it in an attempt to fix another issue I thought it was causing (it wasn't). Here it is if you are curious:
https://gist.github.com/fowkswe/20a7c4c03835de183ff68fe5ab1a...
I'll give Sendy credit for getting me this far, though I would like to replace it someday with something I feel I have more control over. Not sure the OP or the other suggestions listed here offer exactly what I'm looking for.
[+] [-] kyriakos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diegorbaquero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanthoms|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gingerling|10 years ago|reply
We offer phpList as a hosted service on phpList.com. It's the same code (AGPL) but we deal with deliverability, updates etc. Our clients range from 300 mails a month (free) to high volume senders on VPS with millions of subscribers and mails :)
[+] [-] dest|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
I am at a point now with Ghostnote alone that my mailing list on mailchimp is costing me $150 a month.
The project is healthy profitable but its still maybe a $1K a year when all comes to all. Money I would rather spend on other things.
[+] [-] bhouston|10 years ago|reply
I use sendy.co, but its WYSIWUG editor is not great compared to MailChimp -- that is the only real thing I think MailChimp has over sendy.co.
[+] [-] s9ix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] backwardm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmaly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonydenyer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruffrey|10 years ago|reply