Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source newsletter app like Mailchimp

The value in SAAS email services like MailChimp is not really in the sending infrastructure. It's in the dark arts of keeping your IP's from spam blacklists and ensuring email delivery rates are sufficient. You'll find that any naive attempt at running your own will be very hard to scale.

It has an interesting license history:<p>&gt; Versions 1.22.0 and up GPL-V3.0<p>&gt; Versions 1.21.0 and up: EUPL-1.1<p>&gt; Versions 1.19.0 and up: MIT<p>&gt; Up to versions 1.18.0 GPL-V3.0<p>There&#x27;s no rationale for the changes in the commit logs nor could I find any related issues. Curious as to what caused this in only a few releases.<p>edit: formatting

I really dislike mailchimp. You spend a lot of money every month and get almost no innovation from their product. It seems like there’s an opportunity for a new enterprise mail sender to take away mailchimps top customers. Through the mailchimp API the service could review the historical open&#x2F;click rates and if they show sufficient quality then a one button click could import all of that data. The enterprise mail sender could get there if they were willing to offer a free service for the first six months to build up the algorithmic reputation.

We recently moved to Mailtrain for the Citationsy newsletter after hitting 10K users and not having sent a newsletter from MailChimp for a couple months (basically since we hit 2K users, the limit for the free plan). We now use Mailtrain with Amazon SES and it costs less than a dollar to send one issue of the newsletter, as opposed to $250 on MailChimp. I can absolutely see the value in MailChimp, their editor is one of the best and the tools and ease of use are second to none, but the dirty secret is that you can still build your email in MailChimp, and then simply export the HTML and send it with Mailtrain.

Still no sane installation, still can’t use. “Clone this git repo and run this Docker thing” isn’t for me. If this was made into a normal system package like a .deb and&#x2F;or .rpm, I would run this in a heartbeat. Or even if it could be run as a Heroku type buildpack. But this whole process is unnecessary complex.

I have used Mailtrain and it&#x27;s a simple alternative to Mailchimp (that I also use at work). I want to recommend Sendy, though, that costs around $60 for a one-time license and uses AWS SES for sending out mail. I bought it recently and am quite happy with it. Support indie developers!

Neat. Is this your app? The tabs on the top of mailtrain.org seem to want me to log in, which is confusing or possibly broken?<p>How would you compare it to Sendy and EmailOctopus?<p>I send a lot of email newsletters and I&#x27;ve always wanted to do this general approach (decouple list management &amp; analytics from SMTP &amp; deliverability) but found existing solutions pretty far from what we&#x27;d require.

Mailtrain certainly works very, very well. I wouldn&#x27;t go back to a paying service.<p>And the &quot;deliverability issue&quot; stated as an &quot;advantage&quot; of commercial mailing solution providers is way overblown (fear always works in manipulation), as long as you follow the now very well documented rules for sane emailing practice. It&#x27;s really not hard at all.

Slight off topic rant:<p>It&#x27;s 2018 and we still don&#x27;t have a better alternative to email? Almost everyone is on Facebook but even if you do follow a page, FB deprioritizes your posts unless you pay. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to send notifications but then people have to install yet another app. Web notifications don&#x27;t work on iOS.<p>I guess text messages are better and I haven&#x27;t received any unwanted messages from the few companies I opt in for notifications.