I wrote listmonk[1] after running into difficulties scaling existing open source list managers including Mailtrain to millions of subscribers. It is a single binary app that can run on a potato VM instance.
Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
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Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#92For folks looking for a Rails engine that doesn’t ship with a GUI, I built Caffeinate to manage/create/send scheduled email sequences/drip campaigns: https://caffeinate.email
It could also be used for creating and managing a newsletter, but doing so is undocumented as of writing.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer or just very very poor? Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier than now
At a previous job, all API errors were emailed to internal email lists. The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system health by looking at the number of unread messages in his inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not uh, "best practice".
We used this Django feature as a poor man's Sentry years back.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#94For those saying that this is a complicated solution: it is. I started using Sendy with SES a few years ago and it was much easier to setup compared to this blog post. Went from $120 / mo to pennies, + the initial cost of Sendy. If you're a developer, it's worth it.
Is there anything similar that does not use Amazon?
Mailcoach [1] is another self-hosted email marketing tool. It isn't tied to SES and can be used with Postmark, Sendgrid or any other SMTP server.
Initial price is much higher than Sendy, but Mailchimp recently also added a drip campaigns feature.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#95Speaking from personal experiences on non-dedicated IP plans on both SendGrid and SES, SES is much better in deliverability of transactional emails, esp. when sent to .edu domains. I felt like SES is more careful in vetting their customers to prevent shared IPs being polluted.
I feel administrators for EDUs (for example) know how to easily block all of sendgrid or mailchimp but don’t know how to block all of SES without blocking the Dean’s Amazon receipts.
FWIW EDUs typically use an external service like https://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#96I wrote listmonk[1] after running into difficulties scaling existing open source list managers including Mailtrain to millions of subscribers. It is a single binary app that can run on a potato VM instance. [1] https://listmonk.app
That’s really nice looking!
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of them. People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes of thousands of gmail users have never tried.
Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's no…
“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think GDPR is applicable to private individuals running a newsletter..
GDPR as far as I know applies to anyone collecting data within the EU. But seriously the people who would think this is a great ad for mailchimp because the savings are so low are companies.
My understanding is that it applies globally, regarding data collected on EU citizens. Enforcement is obviously a question here.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of these €50/month does it take to reconsider? €50 for hosting, €50 for email, €50 for tracing, €50 for sentiment analysis, €50 for this, €50 for that. By the time you realise, you are burning €6k a year on stuff that takes hours to roll out yourself.
You are suggesting rolling out all of those things yourself will take only a one-time investment of "hours" (meaning fewer than 10?), with no ongoing maintenance? I think at minimum "hours" per month seems more realistic, no?
Maintenance isn't too bad IMO.
I've been running Sendy for a while on my own host. I spend about 30 minutes a year on maintenance time to occasionally upgrade versions. Each upgrade takes about 10 minutes and I tend do it every few months.
Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
#100If you're ready to pay 5$ each month for each thousand subscribers, Buttondown seems like a great tool. It does offert paid subscriptions as well if you want to earn money with your content. https://buttondown.email
Intriguing. But run by one person? That's not worth the risk.
> But run by one person? That's not worth the risk.
I have no affiliation with them but I did speak to the guy who runs Buttondown on my podcast. He went over how it's built and deployed at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/70-buttondown-lets-y...
He has clients with over 100k+ people on their list and has put in a lot of thought and leg work to ensure good deliverability rates. It's also been running for ~5 years.