
Show HN: A self-hosted email engine - freekmurze
https://mailcoach.app
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rolleiflex
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.

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PetahNZ
Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.

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masukomi
that's because SES HATES being used. IT's very much a "If you absolutely
_must_ send and email from here.. fine. we'll let you, but you _really_ ought
to use some other service."

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JoshTriplett
Can you elaborate a little on that? SES looks reasonable from the outside;
what problems does it have that other email services don't?

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robjan
Not GP but I can give you my experience. SES seems to be a "good enough"
solution if you use their API. There are a lot of missing features, such as
logging anything other than metadata, which makes it not so useful if you are
operating in a regulated industry.

The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow
and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. The only way to
somewhat mitigate it is to deploy a postfix into EC2 and then queue your
emails there.

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JoshTriplett
> The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow
> and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads.

Ah, that's helpful to know. I would normally have wanted to use the SMTP
gateway as a more portable API, to avoid tying things to Amazon-specific APIs.
But it sounds like doing so would add substantial fragility.

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gramakri
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?

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lykr0n
Awesome. We can never have enough of high quality self hosted software.

~~~
ultrarunner
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.

~~~
Isinlor
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 :) .

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LeifCarrotson
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
So use PHPTheRightWay to come up with some interview questions to filter those
folks out. Problem solved!

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thomasedwards
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))

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anonme4ever
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.

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continuations
> 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?

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

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brian_herman__
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)

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mahesh_rm
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
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.

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

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

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

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spiddly9
it does support plain smtp for sending

source: I bought it

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

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CallMeMarc
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
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.

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sam_lowry_
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.

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p1mrx
> DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all properly set up.

Does the IPv6 address have matching forward/reverse DNS?

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sam_lowry_
Yes

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stiray
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
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...

