
Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source newsletter app like Mailchimp - mottiden
https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain
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aphextron
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.

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joecot
You use Mailtrain to manage your list subscriptions and manage your email
blasts. If you want your email to then land in inboxes instead of spam, you
can use an emailing service, like MailGun or Amazon SES, to actually send the
mail. Instructions for using both are on Mailtrain's wiki.

The problem with MailChimp is that it's very simple and easy to use, and once
your list actually gets popular the pricing falls off a cliff. At 2,000
subscribers MailChimp is free; at 3,000 it's $50 a month, and it keeps going
up.

There's no monthly fee to send email through Mailgun, and the only thing they
charge for is number of emails: you can send 10,000 a month for free, and it's
$5 per 10,000 after that. You can also manage mailing lists directly through
mailgun, but it doesn't have as polished an interface (and you need to send
the actual mailings yourself through the API). So if you want a polished
interface, use MailTrain to manage your lists and Mailgun to send the emails.

Amazon SES is even cheaper, and also hooks into Mailtrain. "$0 for the first
62,000 emails sent per month, and $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent thereafter."

MailChimp offers better deliverability than Mailgun and SES, but at a pretty
steep cost. If you're a professional company with income, pay the $50+ a month
for Mailchimp. If you're doing a list for a sidegig or a hobby, use Mailtrain.

~~~
eli
That difference in price only gets more pronounced as you scale up.

The cost isn't just in dollars, but in time and hassle. MailChimp will halt
your send and wait for a human to review it and your list practices if you hit
various undisclosed triggers. Makes sense, but if your emails are time
critical and have real revenue riding on them, it's not really workable.

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wefarrell
The alternative is to use a service that doesn't review suspicious activity,
which is going to have significantly worse delivery rates.

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eli
I think a much more common alternative is to work with a provider who
specializes in enterprise customers instead of small retail customers.

I'm happy to sign a long term contract and make guarantees about my list
acquisition practices, but I lose money and my readers' trust if I click the
Send button and it doesn't send.

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bjpbakker
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

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rdlecler1
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.

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Cenk
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
I am curious whether your stats such as open rate changed after you have
migrated.

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IgorPartola
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
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.

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ofrzeta
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!

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eli
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.

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ausjke
a naive question, what about GNU mailman, yes it does not have the fancy GUI
but it gets the job done?

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joecot
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.

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benevol
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
Or just uses SES - costs $1 for 10K emails.

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scarface74
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
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
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.

