
Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone - andris9
http://mailtrain.org
======
justinator
Also my Dada Mail Project is something I've been working on since _1999_.
[http://dadamailproject.com](http://dadamailproject.com)

Self-hosted, works with Amazon SES. I have many clients that send many
thousands of messages using the cheapest of Bluehost shared hosting accounts,
when you also use Amazon SES as the mail service. (Things like Board of
Realtors groups that post realty available to a discussion list)

~~~
the-dude
Hi Justin

I have known your project for a very long time now.

Have you ever considered offering it as a SaaS ? Why not?

~~~
justinator
> Have you ever considered offering it as a SaaS ?

Sure, I've thought about it;

> Why not?

I'm probably at the limit of what I, as the sole developer of the project can
do (or want to do) alone, while also performing my other tasks - such as my
excellent product support for my clients.

To move to _also_ running a SaaS, I would need a highly motivated partner to
help with the workload of development some of the additional parts of the
business.

For now, I'm pretty happy with existing in the niche I've made for myself:
mostly those individuals and small businesses who find a SaaS like MailChimp
too expensive to use. Really - all you need for something like Dada Mail to
get started is a shared hosting account - something "Joe's Italian Restaurant"
down the street probably already has. If you want to move up, hooking up
Amazon SES is a no brainer and solves most all of the problems with sending
out messages to a mailing list.

I also enjoy the quality of life given to me knowing I don't have to make sure
the service is running 24/7\. I live simply, and there's many projects and
goals in my life that do not directly involve software.

~~~
the-dude
Thank you for answering, can totally relate to the quality of life part. Good
luck.

~~~
justinator
Thank you! And thanks for keeping tabs!

------
etjossem
Another alternative: SendGrid recently released a much less expensive product
[1] which shares most features with MailChimp. Contact storage costs $20 per
month for a typical list of 20,000 subscribers (for comparison, storing the
same number of contacts at MailChimp would be $150/mo).

We handle deliverability issues ourselves, so you won't have to maintain the
reputation of a self-hosted solution. If you have any questions, feel free to
reach out to me - my email's in my profile.

[1] [https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-
marketing](https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-marketing)

Disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

~~~
homero
I'll never use sendgrid with the horrifically complicated pricing schemes, do
it like mailgun

~~~
jazoom
Mailgun restricts features unless you pay more money, which increases as your
plan increases. I prefer SendGrid's model. They're just different pricing
models.

~~~
homero
No way, it's the other way around. Mailgun is free or pay per email, no
restrictions. Sendgrid has convoluted plans and features.

~~~
jazoom
Urgh, sorry. I forgot MailJet and MailGun are different. I was thinking of the
wrong one.

------
awinter-py
my (poor) understanding of email SaaS was that staying off blacklists is the
value add, not the server code. is that wrong?

~~~
andris9
In case of Mailtrain, Sendy, MailWizz et al. you do not send messages directly
but through a paid relay, so the blacklisting is not an issue. The price is
usually quite low, for example using Amazon SES costs about $100 for million
messages. If the volume is low as well, then several providers have generous
free tiers available (SparkPost offers 100k free messages/month), so it might
not cost anything at all. SaaS providers offer convenience – you do not have
to install, maintain or upgrade anything, "it just works" but in the end most
of these use also a relay provider like Amazon SES to do the actual delivery

------
ceejayoz
From Github
([https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain](https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain)):

> Alpha-grade software. Might or might not work as expected. Awful code base,
> needs refactoring. No tests. No documentation.

~~~
Xeoncross
Sounds like most successful applications.

Fills a need. Everything else sucks.

~~~
reitoei
Welcome to software development in 2016.

------
WA
HN, thanks for this thread. I was looking for a self-hosted email newsletter
solution for ages, but couldn't really find good ones. The often claimed value
proposition of _deliverabiliy_ of all the big names is a myth IMHO, at least
in Germany. All the big brand names ALWAYS get put into my spam folder (GMX).
Deliverability is more than _Gmail lets it pass_.

I used a Wordpress Plugin called MyMail for a while, but updating Wordpress is
annoying and I'm always afraid that the plugin changes in some way that it
breaks.

I will check out the suggested solutions here, but if anyone knows from the
top of his head which satisfies these requirements, I'd really appreciate it:

    
    
        - self-hosted (obviously)
        - must be able to use any SMTP server
        - preferrably bounce handling via IMAP
        - double opt-in, which also can be disabled
        - basic API support (subscribe, unsubscribe)
        - one click unsubscribe
        - Autoresponder capabilities (nice would be: lets me set the specific time of delivery. Say: +1 day after signup at 11am)
        - reasonably fast UI
    

Not required:

    
    
        - multi-tenant
        - template builder
        - fancy templates (I will use a very basic email layout)
        - GeoIP
        - CRM capabilities
    

I tried Mautic ([https://www.mautic.org/](https://www.mautic.org/)) which
looked promising, but the UI is so horribly slow, it annoyed me. I don't want
to wait 5 seconds for every HTTP request to complete. Especially if I need to
set up my email campaigns

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Well, deliverability and being self-hosted might not go well together these
days. There is a LOT you need to go in terms of setting up the relevant
infrastructure; the newsletter software is just a tiny fragment of it. And
even if your carefully crafted infrastructure works now, it can suddenly stop,
just because some big e-mail hosting service decides they implement a major
change (see e.g.: [http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp-
res...](http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp-
restrictions)).

~~~
WA
See, I get your point, but my experience is different. All the transactional
emails of my SaaS are sent out with PHP's mail() which is obviously the worst
infrastructure setup you can get and only a fraction is marked as spam for my
receivers.

Same is true for my contact form. A copy is sent to the receiver. This works
with my providers SMTP server and again, not that many problems with
deliverability.

In my limited experience, sending newsletters doesn't have to be a science
project.

~~~
madaxe_again
Yeah, but you aren't pumping out 250,000 emails from that domain every day,
are you?

That's where the whole deliver ability lark comes in, and is why we offload
non-transactional emails to the likes of bronto and adestra. One less thing to
worry about.

~~~
WA
Absolutely, my numbers are way lower.

------
mrweasel
Does anyone know of an open source Mandrill clone, preferably self-hosted?
Finding someone to do newsletters or simply doing via traditional mailing-list
software is pretty easy, but finding an alternative for Mandrill is a bit
harder.

We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill
makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp
account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even
considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone
else would already have done.

~~~
michaeldwan
We're building a self-hosted service similar to Mandrill for bulk and
transactional email on [https://highrisehq.com](https://highrisehq.com).
Mandrill was the only service that offered unlimited sub-accounts each with
their own reputation and quota. We relied on that to offer bulk email to our
customers, and since there’s no good alternative we need to build it in-house.
In addition to sub-accounts & quota management, we needed open+click
analytics, templates, and a fast RPC api. We also don’t want an email provider
going dark on us again, so it’ll support sending from a pool of email
providers. Mailgun is the one we’re using first (it’s been great so far) then
likely SES. We’re going to open source it at some point. It’s written in Go
with a Postgres backend so deployment is straight forward — should be able to
get decent mileage off a single Heroku dyno. I look forward to sharing more
soon!

~~~
heliostatic
This sounds amazing, and addresses a key use case we've had. Looking forward
to seeing the repo one day.

------
slig
There's this really great (paid) software that is orders of magnitude better
than Sendy. [https://www.mailwizz.com/](https://www.mailwizz.com/)

Main differences: built using a PHP framework, has extensions support, works
on SES and competitors and is cheaper.

~~~
JacobJans
It appears to have tons more features. Do you have any experience with it? If
so, what is your use-case?

Thank you!

~~~
slig
I'm still testing it and it looks very solid. After going through the cod for
a few hours, I'm pleasantly surprised.

One money saving feature: you can setup SES and Sparkpost, for instance, and
configure it to send more emails from Sparkpost than through SES, that way you
can save money using free 100k emails/month plan from Sparkpost.

~~~
homero
I wish I found that before sendy

~~~
slig
Me too. The Mailwizz guys are really good at coding and structuring things,
but their marketing skills are not so good. I only found about it by searching
for mail templates on codecanyon.

------
2pointsomone
This is really cool! If anyone is interested in easily making a CRM tool to do
similar things around list management and bulk mailing (and want control on
your environment/stack), I wrote a blogpost on it:
[http://blog.varunarora.com/how-i-made-a-crm-
in-3-hours/](http://blog.varunarora.com/how-i-made-a-crm-in-3-hours/)

------
artf
Nice idea, anyway why all sections are 'restricted content'?

~~~
andris9
The page you see at mailtrain.org is what you get once you install and run the
Mailtrain software from GitHub - it's not a homepage, it is an actual
Mailtrain installation that I use to send out my newsletters

------
pinky07
Odoo also has an open source mailchimp clone:
[https://www.odoo.com/page/email-marketing](https://www.odoo.com/page/email-
marketing)

From the Call-to-actions on the website, to the mass mailing and statistics on
emails. (with a good email template composer)

------
jonathanbull
Throwing my side project into the ring, for anyone looking for a SaaS
alternative: [https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com)

------
t3ra
Can someone compare this to Sendy ?

~~~
shocks
I don't mean to slam the developers, but I use Sendy and have taken a peek
under the hood. The code made me feel sick.

Functionality wise, it seems the same.

ninja edit: it made me sick because it was ugly, didn't feel secure, and it
took me ages to make the changes I needed to make.

~~~
nowprovision
Probably the worst code I've ever seen, copy and paste gone crazy, buggy as
hell in tracking where it is up to, just nasty and I really wanted to like it.
Refund was no problem though.

------
jordanthoms
Great to see new options for this, we are using a hacked up and customized
sendy at the moment and it's pretty awful code to work with.

------
gingerling
I am the phpList community manager. Anyone used phpList before? We're Open
Source (AGPL specifically).

We offer phpList as a hosted service on phpList.com. It's the same code (AGPL)
but we deal with deliverability, updates etc. Our clients range from 300 mails
a month (free) to high volume senders on VPS with millions of subscribers and
mails :)

~~~
dest
Yes I did, as self-hosted and for very low volume. Thank you for being part of
this project. However, I stopped using it because of user-experience issues.
Interface was not clear and efficient enough, especially when working with
templates. Last point, design seemed a bit outdated.

~~~
gingerling
There are UI design changes afoot, I believe. The big changes for self-hosted
users recently are the new manual at www.phplist.org/manual and the new
forums, discuss.phplist.org (using discourse, which I adore!)

I think for small volume it's always better value to use the .com service.
Using self-hosted is a lot of work for small volumes. I always used .com for
my small business (years before I worked for phpList too) :)

------
ThomPete
This is interesting and I might have to give it a try.

I am at a point now with Ghostnote alone that my mailing list on mailchimp is
costing me $150 a month.

The project is healthy profitable but its still maybe a $1K a year when all
comes to all. Money I would rather spend on other things.

------
bhouston
templates?

I use sendy.co, but its WYSIWUG editor is not great compared to MailChimp --
that is the only real thing I think MailChimp has over sendy.co.

~~~
s9ix
We use MailChimp to generate email templates, and then change the content as
needed. There's also [http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-
templates.html](http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html)

------
tmaly
I am not a Node developer. Is there anything like this out there for Go?

------
homero
Woah maybe I can replace sendy but I use lamp

------
antonydenyer
has anyone tried to use any of these solutions for a large-ish email list ie
more than 100k?

------
ruffrey
andris9 you are awesome. I have sent probably hundreds of thousands of emails
over nodemailer.

------
libman
GPL 8-(

~~~
nileshtrivedi
GPL is a problem for libraries, not end-user products like this. For example,
MySQL is GPL too.

~~~
ZachWick
But only for certain a definitions of "problem."

------
Xeoncross
Maybe I missed it, but now they just need to add an inbox so you can talk one-
on-one with customers that want to reply.

~~~
s9ix
Would that not be any mail client?

