6 ms·

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

184 points by mottiden 8y ago

eli 8y ago
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? How would you compare it to Sendy and EmailOctopus? I send a lot of email newsletters and I've always wanted to do this general approach (decouple list management & analytics from SMTP & deliverability) but found existing solutions pretty far from what we'd require.
- ausjke 8y ago
  a naive question, what about GNU mailman, yes it does not have the fancy GUI but it gets the job done?
  - joecot 8y ago
    Mailman is for discussion lists. Mailtrain is for marketing emails. Mailman is really good for setting up discussion lists for a group or even a company, and managing all the people in those lists. People can sign up themselves, and can view list archives. You can have announcement lists, but people sign themselves up, and you generally send the announcements from your own email. If you're making mailing lists for a group of people, mailman works great, but Mailtrain is for marketing. Email marketing software like Mailtrain, or services like Mailchimp, are for sending email blasts for marketing purposes. If you're sending email for marketing, you need to track things like email bounces and unsubscribes, to see how effective your marketing campaigns are. Mailchimp / Mailgun have additional features like report, and click tracking from your emails.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Mailman is for people who really want the newsletter. Recipients have to send an email to subscribe. It's for real newsletters. Mailchump is for spammers. Despite all the frantic spin control, it's spamming.
- tpetry 8y ago
  The decoupling reason and having much better analytics than simple open and click counters was the reason we built https://mailspice.com https://mailspice.com so we could use a good list management tool, a good smtp service and our vendor neutral analytics solution - just to choose the best solution for every area.
  - eli 8y ago
    Cool, will definitely take a look. What do you recommend for list management?
    - tpetry 8y ago
      We first used sendy but then developed our own solution because we had very special requirements that no existing solved: Building visual nice emails but all the time within dome defined CI. So we created a meta language to build emails from email-specific blocks with every block having special purpose (language defined) input fields to fill the placeholders within the block. No WYSIWYG was used because ci conformance can‘t be enforced with these solutions.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- yoran 8y ago
  We migrated from Sendinblue to Sendy like everyone, to save costs. We've sent two newsletters now with Sendy. It works well. However, I dug into the code just out of curiosity and it looks pretty horrible. This doesn't give me too much confidence in upgrading to a more recent version as it works now. At first sight, the mailtrain code looks a bit nicer, and it has a "/test" directory.
Proven 8y ago
GPL 3.0 - too much trouble
aphextron 8y ago
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.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Or you could just not send spam in the first place.
  - txsh 8y ago
    You don’t have to send spam to end up on a blacklist.
  - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
    Just sending a completely legit email newsletter with a gmail address can get you blacklisted. It's a sad reality but that's how the email works today.
  - Urgo 8y ago
    We have about 700k users who have opted in to our newsletter but we only send one a couple times a year. As a result mailchimp's costs are way too much so we've used Sendy the past couple years. Our emails are definitely not spam as they're announcing new products/features/company related/etc and again, only a couple of times a year... but over time more and more often the newsletters end up in peoples spam folders. We're sending through SES so this really shouldn't be an issue but it does. I'm not sure if Mailtrain will do something that sendy doesn't do to make mail deliver better but it really seems more like mailchimp gives some kickback or deal to gmail/etc or gmail just knows that people using mailchimp are paying a lot so that goes through... Anyway long story short, Mailtrain sounds interesting if it can solve this issue... but it's really not just spam that gets blocked as spam these days, its a major pay to play game and its the email companies that are getting paid, not the people getting the emails.
    - 8y ago
Cenk 8y ago
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.
- rwieruch 8y ago
  I am curious whether your stats such as open rate changed after you have migrated.
ofrzeta 8y ago
I have used Mailtrain and it'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!
bjpbakker 8y ago
It has an interesting license history: > Versions 1.22.0 and up GPL-V3.0 > Versions 1.21.0 and up: EUPL-1.1 > Versions 1.19.0 and up: MIT > Up to versions 1.18.0 GPL-V3.0 There'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. edit: formatting
benevol 8y ago
Mailtrain certainly works very, very well. I wouldn't go back to a paying service. And the "deliverability issue" stated as an "advantage" 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's really not hard at all.
- Cenk 8y ago
  Or just uses SES - costs $1 for 10K emails.
IgorPartola 8y ago
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/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.
- gitgud 8y ago
  I was actually impressed by the installation instructions. Sometimes opensource projects like this require several specific library installations, compilation, set environment variables etc. This has two incredibly lightweight installations, a docker build and a node-js install. Both can be installed and removed fairly easily in my opinion.
scarface74 8y ago
Slight off topic rant: It's 2018 and we still don'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't work on iOS. I guess text messages are better and I haven't received any unwanted messages from the few companies I opt in for notifications.
- fwn 8y ago
  Prior to asking for email alternatives one would probably need to define which features and procedures of current email usage are meant to be replaced. I am a heavy email user and I am glad that none of the loads of services pitched as email alternatives were successful. It's a solid tool working great for most people.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    The signal to noise ratio is too low for email. Spam filters are pretty good these days but they still have false positives and negatives. The other methods of contact - cell, text, messenging apps, etc are easier to white list people. I know you can create separate alias emails for each point of contact that are all funneled to one inbox that hopefully remains private but that's still complicated. I guess I'm looking for an easier way to give out emails that are specific to one contact that you can easily filter.
rdlecler1 8y ago
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/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.

184 points by mottiden 8y ago

eli 8y ago

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? How would you compare it to Sendy and EmailOctopus? I send a lot of email newsletters and I've always wanted to do this general approach (decouple list management & analytics from SMTP & deliverability) but found existing solutions pretty far from what we'd require.

ausjke 8y ago
a naive question, what about GNU mailman, yes it does not have the fancy GUI but it gets the job done?
- joecot 8y ago
  Mailman is for discussion lists. Mailtrain is for marketing emails. Mailman is really good for setting up discussion lists for a group or even a company, and managing all the people in those lists. People can sign up themselves, and can view list archives. You can have announcement lists, but people sign themselves up, and you generally send the announcements from your own email. If you're making mailing lists for a group of people, mailman works great, but Mailtrain is for marketing. Email marketing software like Mailtrain, or services like Mailchimp, are for sending email blasts for marketing purposes. If you're sending email for marketing, you need to track things like email bounces and unsubscribes, to see how effective your marketing campaigns are. Mailchimp / Mailgun have additional features like report, and click tracking from your emails.
- Animats 8y ago
  Mailman is for people who really want the newsletter. Recipients have to send an email to subscribe. It's for real newsletters. Mailchump is for spammers. Despite all the frantic spin control, it's spamming.
tpetry 8y ago
The decoupling reason and having much better analytics than simple open and click counters was the reason we built https://mailspice.com https://mailspice.com so we could use a good list management tool, a good smtp service and our vendor neutral analytics solution - just to choose the best solution for every area.
- eli 8y ago
  Cool, will definitely take a look. What do you recommend for list management?
  - tpetry 8y ago
    We first used sendy but then developed our own solution because we had very special requirements that no existing solved: Building visual nice emails but all the time within dome defined CI. So we created a meta language to build emails from email-specific blocks with every block having special purpose (language defined) input fields to fill the placeholders within the block. No WYSIWYG was used because ci conformance can‘t be enforced with these solutions.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
yoran 8y ago
We migrated from Sendinblue to Sendy like everyone, to save costs. We've sent two newsletters now with Sendy. It works well. However, I dug into the code just out of curiosity and it looks pretty horrible. This doesn't give me too much confidence in upgrading to a more recent version as it works now. At first sight, the mailtrain code looks a bit nicer, and it has a "/test" directory.

Proven 8y ago

GPL 3.0 - too much trouble

aphextron 8y ago

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.

ams6110 8y ago
Or you could just not send spam in the first place.
- txsh 8y ago
  You don’t have to send spam to end up on a blacklist.
- cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
  Just sending a completely legit email newsletter with a gmail address can get you blacklisted. It's a sad reality but that's how the email works today.
- Urgo 8y ago
  We have about 700k users who have opted in to our newsletter but we only send one a couple times a year. As a result mailchimp's costs are way too much so we've used Sendy the past couple years. Our emails are definitely not spam as they're announcing new products/features/company related/etc and again, only a couple of times a year... but over time more and more often the newsletters end up in peoples spam folders. We're sending through SES so this really shouldn't be an issue but it does. I'm not sure if Mailtrain will do something that sendy doesn't do to make mail deliver better but it really seems more like mailchimp gives some kickback or deal to gmail/etc or gmail just knows that people using mailchimp are paying a lot so that goes through... Anyway long story short, Mailtrain sounds interesting if it can solve this issue... but it's really not just spam that gets blocked as spam these days, its a major pay to play game and its the email companies that are getting paid, not the people getting the emails.
  - 8y ago

Cenk 8y ago

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.

rwieruch 8y ago
I am curious whether your stats such as open rate changed after you have migrated.

ofrzeta 8y ago

I have used Mailtrain and it'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!

bjpbakker 8y ago

It has an interesting license history: > Versions 1.22.0 and up GPL-V3.0 > Versions 1.21.0 and up: EUPL-1.1 > Versions 1.19.0 and up: MIT > Up to versions 1.18.0 GPL-V3.0 There'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. edit: formatting

benevol 8y ago

Mailtrain certainly works very, very well. I wouldn't go back to a paying service. And the "deliverability issue" stated as an "advantage" 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's really not hard at all.

Cenk 8y ago
Or just uses SES - costs $1 for 10K emails.

IgorPartola 8y ago

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/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.

gitgud 8y ago
I was actually impressed by the installation instructions. Sometimes opensource projects like this require several specific library installations, compilation, set environment variables etc. This has two incredibly lightweight installations, a docker build and a node-js install. Both can be installed and removed fairly easily in my opinion.

scarface74 8y ago

Slight off topic rant: It's 2018 and we still don'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't work on iOS. I guess text messages are better and I haven't received any unwanted messages from the few companies I opt in for notifications.

fwn 8y ago
Prior to asking for email alternatives one would probably need to define which features and procedures of current email usage are meant to be replaced. I am a heavy email user and I am glad that none of the loads of services pitched as email alternatives were successful. It's a solid tool working great for most people.
- scarface74 8y ago
  The signal to noise ratio is too low for email. Spam filters are pretty good these days but they still have false positives and negatives. The other methods of contact - cell, text, messenging apps, etc are easier to white list people. I know you can create separate alias emails for each point of contact that are all funneled to one inbox that hopefully remains private but that's still complicated. I guess I'm looking for an easier way to give out emails that are specific to one contact that you can easily filter.

rdlecler1 8y ago

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/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.