9 ms·

Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

149 points by freekmurze 7y ago

lykr0n 7y ago
Awesome. We can never have enough of high quality self hosted software.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  As someone who has been out of the PHP game for a long time, is it still a viable choice for new software? I don't have fond memories of the language at that time, so seeing PHP in the demo video poster frame was an immediate mark against pitching this at my company. That made me wonder whether it's a reasonable reaction to have. Edit for the downvoters— this is an honest question and I very much agree that we can never have too much high-quality self-hosted software. If that can be done with PHP I'm open-minded.
  - robjan 7y ago
    PHP is getting a lot better these days. There is still a lot of clunky legacy syntax but the performance and features are pretty much on par with other scripting languages now.
    - lykr0n 7y ago
      Even better in some cases. PHP is slamming raw c function calls for some stuff, which makes some operations as fast as compiled binaries.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    The latest versions of PHP aren't too bad. That said Node.js has IMO an interesting architecture because it's event driven, combine that with Typescript and it's solid. Python type support, and event driven frameworks (e.g. async/await) were only (fairly) recently made accessible, there's a few frameworks that can utilize it well like FastAPI, but many of the popular ones like Django are still behind on async/await support for the a lot of features like the ORM and still is lacking typing support. IMO the python web development system is going to be really awesome once Django gets robust types and async support. Disclaimer: Current job uses python/Django and js. I have little experience with other languages/frameworks.
  - Isinlor 7y ago
    PHP is a very good choice. If you want to refresh your knowledge of PHP take a look here: https://phptherightway.com/ https://phptherightway.com/ It's fast. PHP has great documentation. PHP ecosystem is now based around Composer, in comparison to mess of package management in JavaScript and Python, Composer is just wonderful to use. Packagist has ton of libraries. Share nothing architecture is very easy to maintain and scale. You can do strict typing. There are static code analysis libraries like Psalm and PHPStan if you want features normally offered by compilers. It's easy to hire devs. There are two wonderful frameworks that moder PHP is centered around: Laravel and Symfony. There is also community body issuing standards to ease framework interoperability: https://www.php-fig.org/psr/ https://www.php-fig.org/psr/ The app seems to be written in Laravel, so you can take a look here if it's your coup of tea: https://laravel.com/ https://laravel.com/ Having said that, Wordpress and other old code bases are still a mess. But stable mess, and business like stable :) .
    - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
      The hazard is that it was such a big mess in the past that if you want to hire someone to work on your self-hosted app, there are going to be a lot of applicants who want to use PHP the wrong way.
      - smacktoward 7y ago
        So use PHPTheRightWay to come up with some interview questions to filter those folks out. Problem solved!
    - theamk 7y ago
      I did a quick look through PhpTheRightWay website, and I saw no mention of the advice that php user should have no permissions to change app code -- or in other words, that "deploy" and "run" users should be different. Is this the recommended practice now? Because that was the main reason to avoid PHP codebases for me. Having an app where any code execution bug instantly leads to permanent compromise scares me deeply.
      - 7y ago
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    For me, the main reason I like it is that I love my cheap shared webhost. I've been with them for 13 years and they're rock solid, the price stays the same and the amount of space, traffic and DB and general admin options just keep getting increased. Should they ever go away, all I need is PHP and MySQL, no special modules or fancy .htaccess required. Every single file is code or data, I like that. At least the way I use it, which is very modest in scope, it's like making portable apps... whereas all the modern stuff with installation and deployment processes are more like things you need to install and which write settings to some registry, to the point they run in virtual machines. That's just overkill for me and what I do. I'd rather "everybody" was able to develop simple sites like I am able to, than me being able to make some super fancy shit. I generally don't pour time and energy into tech and companies that don't benefit "the little man" should the little man show interest, and if in doubt, I prefer things that have been around for decades, for making things that I might want to keep using and expanding for decades, too.
  - mikece 7y ago
    I understand not wanting to write PHP for an app I have to maintain as part of my daily work, but for something like this where you want to sell it to anyone and have it run anywhere, it's hard to be more universal than "PHP and MySQL" (though it does make me smile when SQLite is an option as well).
  - mekster 7y ago
    When you can't exactly tell what was bad about PHP, then it may just be an impression given to you from a lousy programmer who would just blame the tools instead or from some messy code which apparently isn't the fault of the language. What's wrong about it really? If you're an author of an opensource web app, it's a smart choice to pick PHP to have as much audience as you could get. PHP is the primary candidate for any VPS.
thomasedwards 7y ago
Useful for those a bit annoyed by Mailchimp deleting accounts without reason (Previously on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866)
buboard 7y ago
This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?
- CallMeMarc 7y ago
  Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/
  - brenden2 7y ago
    That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
    - CallMeMarc 7y ago
      Kinda two use cases here with my being more on the business side than personal, that's true. You may be right for small personal scenarios.
    - sam_lowry_ 7y ago
      Running own SMTP server for personal use is hard. Google is the worst adversary just because of their market share. I have a mail server for personal use, and I send less than 10 mails per day for many years. DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up. I am signed up to all possible postmaster tools, including that of Google. Still, Google started blocking mail sent from my IPv6 address in December. I switched to IPv4, and it fixed the issues for existing gmail recipients, but new recipients usually see my mail in Spam. When I don't get a reply for a few days, I mail them from my backup @gmail.com account and ask to unmark me as spam and add to contacts. So far, this helps. P.S. I also run a community website on a different domain and IP. It sends tens of thousands of notification emails per month, and it fares better in Google Postmaster Tools. User-reported spam is within 1% and it seems that this is acceptable behaviour for Google.
continuations 7y ago
> Cut the costs of a growing audience > It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun or Sendgrid to send out mailings How is this going to "cut the costs" when you still have to pay the costs of SES/Mailgun/Sendgrid?
- robjan 7y ago
  Those services are a lot cheaper per email than fully integrated marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, when you have a lot of subscribers.
thr483900 7y ago
Just curious, which JS framework are you using for the front-end?
buzzert 7y ago
Thanks for making your website perfectly readable without JS enabled! A rare occurrence nowadays.
rolleiflex 7y ago
I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user) Sendy does look like it has more features though - and it has been around for far longer, corner cases debugged and all. I’d love to hear how this is any different from Sendy.
- Tomte 7y ago
  I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it". I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.
  - corobo 7y ago
    Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP
    - Tomte 7y ago
      And it's a hurdle when the audience is small non-tech businesses wanting a newsletter. For a dev company, maybe even integrating it into one of their applications, great! Sendy targets very much the former ones. I just assume MailCoach does, too, but I don't really know.
      - masukomi 7y ago
        It's a hurdle for anyone who isn't a PHP developer. Why would anyone else have reason to know that?
- PetahNZ 7y ago
  Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Using GitHub issues for support when there's no code/it's not open source is an interesting choice. Definitely makes it convenient though.
stiray 7y ago
Please endure my ignorance, but what is this? Spamtool with a potential feedback trough images in html mail that report back if email was viewed? I just don't get it, this can be acomplished very simply with shell script and web server... or?
- masukomi 7y ago
  some folks actually create valuable newsletters worth reading. but yeah, it'll be used to spam people about your "latest offerings" and "great new features" and...
brian_herman__ 7y ago
You have some squares on your site are you putting emoji's on the site my web browser cannot process it. My user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.130 Safari/537.36 Google Chrome on Debian Here is a screenshot: https://ibb.co/qsnrD2n https://ibb.co/qsnrD2n
gramakri 7y ago
We send our newsletters via mailtrain - https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain with postmark as the backend. Where mailtrain falls short is the template editor but since we are geeks we get by with some raw html :) Is there a way to try mailcoach without paying for it first? Is there an API to import users?
locusm 7y ago
Did I miss something or it doesnt support straight SMTP to send?
- spiddly9 7y ago
  it does support plain smtp for sending source: I bought it
mahesh_rm 7y ago
Listmonk was posted here some time ago, I have yet to try it out, but if you are not scared by alpha-quality code, it could be a good free performance-driven alternative to this: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk
- filesystemdude 7y ago
  Not intentionally picking on Listmonk (or you), but when I hear "alpha-quality code" and start thinking about the complexities of marketing emails with GDPR, CCPA, and the constant threat of blacklists and otherwise getting blocked by big G, I run for the hills.
anonme4ever 7y ago
Open alternatives : - https://mailtrain.org/ https://mailtrain.org/ And more like mailgun : - https://postal.atech.media/ https://postal.atech.media/ Both hosted and easy to use.

149 points by freekmurze 7y ago

lykr0n 7y ago

Awesome. We can never have enough of high quality self hosted software.

ultrarunner 7y ago
As someone who has been out of the PHP game for a long time, is it still a viable choice for new software? I don't have fond memories of the language at that time, so seeing PHP in the demo video poster frame was an immediate mark against pitching this at my company. That made me wonder whether it's a reasonable reaction to have. Edit for the downvoters— this is an honest question and I very much agree that we can never have too much high-quality self-hosted software. If that can be done with PHP I'm open-minded.
- robjan 7y ago
  PHP is getting a lot better these days. There is still a lot of clunky legacy syntax but the performance and features are pretty much on par with other scripting languages now.
  - lykr0n 7y ago
    Even better in some cases. PHP is slamming raw c function calls for some stuff, which makes some operations as fast as compiled binaries.
- penagwin 7y ago
  The latest versions of PHP aren't too bad. That said Node.js has IMO an interesting architecture because it's event driven, combine that with Typescript and it's solid. Python type support, and event driven frameworks (e.g. async/await) were only (fairly) recently made accessible, there's a few frameworks that can utilize it well like FastAPI, but many of the popular ones like Django are still behind on async/await support for the a lot of features like the ORM and still is lacking typing support. IMO the python web development system is going to be really awesome once Django gets robust types and async support. Disclaimer: Current job uses python/Django and js. I have little experience with other languages/frameworks.
- Isinlor 7y ago
  PHP is a very good choice. If you want to refresh your knowledge of PHP take a look here: https://phptherightway.com/ https://phptherightway.com/ It's fast. PHP has great documentation. PHP ecosystem is now based around Composer, in comparison to mess of package management in JavaScript and Python, Composer is just wonderful to use. Packagist has ton of libraries. Share nothing architecture is very easy to maintain and scale. You can do strict typing. There are static code analysis libraries like Psalm and PHPStan if you want features normally offered by compilers. It's easy to hire devs. There are two wonderful frameworks that moder PHP is centered around: Laravel and Symfony. There is also community body issuing standards to ease framework interoperability: https://www.php-fig.org/psr/ https://www.php-fig.org/psr/ The app seems to be written in Laravel, so you can take a look here if it's your coup of tea: https://laravel.com/ https://laravel.com/ Having said that, Wordpress and other old code bases are still a mess. But stable mess, and business like stable :) .
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    The hazard is that it was such a big mess in the past that if you want to hire someone to work on your self-hosted app, there are going to be a lot of applicants who want to use PHP the wrong way.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      So use PHPTheRightWay to come up with some interview questions to filter those folks out. Problem solved!
  - theamk 7y ago
    I did a quick look through PhpTheRightWay website, and I saw no mention of the advice that php user should have no permissions to change app code -- or in other words, that "deploy" and "run" users should be different. Is this the recommended practice now? Because that was the main reason to avoid PHP codebases for me. Having an app where any code execution bug instantly leads to permanent compromise scares me deeply.
    - 7y ago
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  For me, the main reason I like it is that I love my cheap shared webhost. I've been with them for 13 years and they're rock solid, the price stays the same and the amount of space, traffic and DB and general admin options just keep getting increased. Should they ever go away, all I need is PHP and MySQL, no special modules or fancy .htaccess required. Every single file is code or data, I like that. At least the way I use it, which is very modest in scope, it's like making portable apps... whereas all the modern stuff with installation and deployment processes are more like things you need to install and which write settings to some registry, to the point they run in virtual machines. That's just overkill for me and what I do. I'd rather "everybody" was able to develop simple sites like I am able to, than me being able to make some super fancy shit. I generally don't pour time and energy into tech and companies that don't benefit "the little man" should the little man show interest, and if in doubt, I prefer things that have been around for decades, for making things that I might want to keep using and expanding for decades, too.
- mikece 7y ago
  I understand not wanting to write PHP for an app I have to maintain as part of my daily work, but for something like this where you want to sell it to anyone and have it run anywhere, it's hard to be more universal than "PHP and MySQL" (though it does make me smile when SQLite is an option as well).
- mekster 7y ago
  When you can't exactly tell what was bad about PHP, then it may just be an impression given to you from a lousy programmer who would just blame the tools instead or from some messy code which apparently isn't the fault of the language. What's wrong about it really? If you're an author of an opensource web app, it's a smart choice to pick PHP to have as much audience as you could get. PHP is the primary candidate for any VPS.

thomasedwards 7y ago

Useful for those a bit annoyed by Mailchimp deleting accounts without reason (Previously on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866)

buboard 7y ago

This is not my area but why dont people setup their own smtp servers, and use plain tools like readcube?

CallMeMarc 7y ago
Hosting your own email service is way more difficult than just spinning up a smtp server and some interface. Most big providers (like gmail) are more likely to flag incoming mails from unknown servers. That's the reason why stuff like Sendy[1] is so popular. You host your own interface, settings and so on, but the ugly part of sending your email is handled by AWS SES. [1] https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/
- brenden2 7y ago
  That's only true if you're spamming people a lot. Running your own postfix server is trivial, and you'll have a fine reputation so long as you aren't sending marketing BS.
  - CallMeMarc 7y ago
    Kinda two use cases here with my being more on the business side than personal, that's true. You may be right for small personal scenarios.
  - sam_lowry_ 7y ago
    Running own SMTP server for personal use is hard. Google is the worst adversary just because of their market share. I have a mail server for personal use, and I send less than 10 mails per day for many years. DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up. I am signed up to all possible postmaster tools, including that of Google. Still, Google started blocking mail sent from my IPv6 address in December. I switched to IPv4, and it fixed the issues for existing gmail recipients, but new recipients usually see my mail in Spam. When I don't get a reply for a few days, I mail them from my backup @gmail.com account and ask to unmark me as spam and add to contacts. So far, this helps. P.S. I also run a community website on a different domain and IP. It sends tens of thousands of notification emails per month, and it fares better in Google Postmaster Tools. User-reported spam is within 1% and it seems that this is acceptable behaviour for Google.

continuations 7y ago

> Cut the costs of a growing audience > It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun or Sendgrid to send out mailings How is this going to "cut the costs" when you still have to pay the costs of SES/Mailgun/Sendgrid?

robjan 7y ago
Those services are a lot cheaper per email than fully integrated marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, when you have a lot of subscribers.

thr483900 7y ago

Just curious, which JS framework are you using for the front-end?

buzzert 7y ago

Thanks for making your website perfectly readable without JS enabled! A rare occurrence nowadays.

rolleiflex 7y ago

I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user) Sendy does look like it has more features though - and it has been around for far longer, corner cases debugged and all. I’d love to hear how this is any different from Sendy.

Tomte 7y ago
I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it". I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.
- corobo 7y ago
  Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP
  - Tomte 7y ago
    And it's a hurdle when the audience is small non-tech businesses wanting a newsletter. For a dev company, maybe even integrating it into one of their applications, great! Sendy targets very much the former ones. I just assume MailCoach does, too, but I don't really know.
    - masukomi 7y ago
      It's a hurdle for anyone who isn't a PHP developer. Why would anyone else have reason to know that?
PetahNZ 7y ago
Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Using GitHub issues for support when there's no code/it's not open source is an interesting choice. Definitely makes it convenient though.

stiray 7y ago

Please endure my ignorance, but what is this? Spamtool with a potential feedback trough images in html mail that report back if email was viewed? I just don't get it, this can be acomplished very simply with shell script and web server... or?

masukomi 7y ago
some folks actually create valuable newsletters worth reading. but yeah, it'll be used to spam people about your "latest offerings" and "great new features" and...

brian_herman__ 7y ago

You have some squares on your site are you putting emoji's on the site my web browser cannot process it. My user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.130 Safari/537.36 Google Chrome on Debian Here is a screenshot: https://ibb.co/qsnrD2n https://ibb.co/qsnrD2n

gramakri 7y ago

We send our newsletters via mailtrain - https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain with postmark as the backend. Where mailtrain falls short is the template editor but since we are geeks we get by with some raw html :) Is there a way to try mailcoach without paying for it first? Is there an API to import users?

locusm 7y ago

Did I miss something or it doesnt support straight SMTP to send?

spiddly9 7y ago
it does support plain smtp for sending source: I bought it

mahesh_rm 7y ago

Listmonk was posted here some time ago, I have yet to try it out, but if you are not scared by alpha-quality code, it could be a good free performance-driven alternative to this: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

filesystemdude 7y ago
Not intentionally picking on Listmonk (or you), but when I hear "alpha-quality code" and start thinking about the complexities of marketing emails with GDPR, CCPA, and the constant threat of blacklists and otherwise getting blocked by big G, I run for the hills.

anonme4ever 7y ago

Open alternatives : - https://mailtrain.org/ https://mailtrain.org/ And more like mailgun : - https://postal.atech.media/ https://postal.atech.media/ Both hosted and easy to use.