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Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

mailtrain.org

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#41
This is interesting and I might have to give it a try.

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.

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#42
post #3

From Github ( https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain ): > Alpha-grade software. Might or might not work as expected. Awful code base, needs refactoring. No tests. No documentation.

> No tests.

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.

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#43
post #22
post #2

Can someone compare this to Sendy ?

I don't mean to slam the developers, but I use Sendy and have taken a peek under the hood. The code made me feel sick. 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.

Probably the worst code I've ever seen, copy and paste gone crazy, buggy as hell in tracking where it is up to, just nasty and I really wanted to like it. Refund was no problem though.

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#44
post #22
post #2

Can someone compare this to Sendy ?

I don't mean to slam the developers, but I use Sendy and have taken a peek under the hood. The code made me feel sick. 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.

Probably the worst code I've ever seen, copy and paste gone crazy, buggy as hell in tracking where it is up to, just nasty and I really wanted to like it. Refund was no problem though.

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#45
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/

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get asked this question a lot, and I don't actually know what people are asking for. Perhaps a better question would be, "Does it have a wordpress plugin that allows me to do $some_intesting_thing" If you have a Wordpress site (or any site design), Dada Mail has a templating system to allow it to take on that design, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-EEvGVCJl4 and adding something like a subscription form is an…

i'd definitely love to talk to you. how can we get in touch?

FYI: You can always check someone's profile and see if they have info listed, more efficient and cuts down on extraneous comments and waiting on replies.

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#48

templates? 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.

The Litmus templates are really well made and look great in all email clients I've tried them in. https://litmus.com/resources/free-responsive-email-templates

Re: Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone

#49
post #2

Can someone compare this to Sendy ?

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:

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.

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