
Mailtrain Newsletter #8 – Bundled MTA - andris9
https://mailtrain.org/archive/rJayV7kh/EysIv8sAx/SklBfpME?track=no
======
aeviator
I've been using mailtrain in a business context (not talking about buy in
newsletters) for a while now and I purely love it! It's fast, reliable and the
ui is perfectly organized.

What I still miss is simple Email functions like adding attachements and CC
receipients. This sounds rediculous, but the missing CC has been keeping us
off from using mailtrain in a lot of campaigns where simply other people where
important to be informed about replies.

Still I suggest anyone trying out mailtrain as it is super simple to spin up.
I love seeing it getting new releases, thumbs up!

~~~
andris9
Attachment support was added just today, see the related blog post:
[https://mailtrain.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/attachment-
suppor...](https://mailtrain.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/attachment-support-in-
mailtrain/)

I don't really get what you mean by the CC recipients. Could you create a new
issue in the Mailtrain issue tracker in Github and describe what you would
like to have
[https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain/issues](https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain/issues)

------
Daviey
For the lazy, has anyone done any cost analysis?

I've used Sendy (self-hosted php, but non-free licence) before, and that is
tied to just Amazon SES.. but this has a few options.

~~~
pastullo
I also use Sendy: one with Amazon SES and one with a more dodgy local Postfix
server. I am quite happy with it, but the feature missing in sendy is
Segmentation. How does this compare?

~~~
andris9
Mailtrain allows you to create segments over exact or relative matches eg.
"all users where signup date is after 7 days before today" or "users who have
custom numeric field value between 1 and 10". There's not too much
documentation about it but you an find some from the Wiki
[https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain/wiki/Relative-date-
rang...](https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain/wiki/Relative-date-ranges-in-
segments)

------
brunoqc
I have a question for Amazon SES users. Do you need to submit the "Request a
Sending Limit Increase" form to send emails to domains you don't own? Can it
still be free? I just want to send 3-4 emails a day from my vps and my home
router.

------
youeeeeeediot
Anyone with any experience with this product? I've got a lot of users who want
to use Mailchimp, but we run a very restrictive SPF/dmarc and we will not
include any 3rd parties.

This might be a good solution for self-hosting our own.

~~~
jedberg
The biggest value Mailchimp provides is _deliverability_. They spend a lot of
time working with ISPs to maintain the reputation of their IPs to make sure
their mail ends up in the inbox and not the spam box.

You can't self host that.

The mailing list features themselves aren't much different than anyone else
offers.

~~~
youeeeeeediot
I would argue that they absolutely fail in that regard. The default behavior
from the service seems to be "impersonate" the user - any corporation that
runs an SPF has to choose to either allow (tolerate) or deny it.

~~~
jedberg
Well yes that's how SPF was designed. Of course if you have an SPF record they
will fail (and so will anyone else) if you don't allow them. That's kind of
the point of SPF -- to prove to everyone else who you trust to deliver mail
for you.

------
drewjaja
How advanced is the segmentation in mailtrain? Can it segment lists like
(ListA + ListB) - ListC

We're currently using Interspire Email Marketer and the segmentation feature
is quite limited.

------
leesalminen
503 Service Unavailable?

~~~
andris9
It was that damn Apache that could not handle any load. Killed it and exposed
Node.js directly instead of proxying through mod_proxy, should be fine now

~~~
brazzledazzle
In my experience this is due to an Apache default configuration that probably
seemed reasonable when introduced but in practice can really screw you.
Basically it caches and serves only the 503 for something like 3s to prevent
the application it's proxying from getting kicked while it's
down/flapping/starting. So the end result is that even if your app is only
occasionally returning 503s for a small subset of users everyone gets to enjoy
them for several seconds every time one is encountered. Fun stuff.

~~~
andris9
It's a really small box (512mb) that runs everyting and on a normal day it
does not have any issues but when the requests from HN started coming in
Apache used up all the RAM. I stopped Apache and started Mailtrain from
command line in a screen session to listen directly on the web ports (so once
it's out from the HN frontpage I can reboot the VPS and everything gets back
to normal settings). So far it has been running smoothly with the server RAM
usage in a constant 50%, no fluctuations
[https://cloudup.com/cokRbDpMIuw](https://cloudup.com/cokRbDpMIuw)

~~~
brazzledazzle
Yeah that's a pretty tight fit. Can't say I have much experience doing that
all on one small box outside of local dev stuff.

