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/) 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
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...).
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.
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.
Is there a, say, ballpark figure on the volume you need to send before switching to a SaaS becomes an interesting option? E.g., i have a newsletter with about 300 subscribers that i'd like to host somewhere else, and i don't think will ever reach more than maybe a couple of thousand readers.
I never thought about that. I only see that hosted newsletter software is too expensive. My requirements:
- Send maybe 2,000 transactional emails per week
- Send a few hundred autoresponders ("newsletters") per week
- Once a year or so, send 70,000 emails to all users who signed up
I neither want to have an email list with 70,000 people in it where only a fraction regularly receives an email. Nor do I want to pay several hundred bucks for the occasional broadcast to the entire user base.
And also: I won't use non-German newsletter providers for privacy reasons. This is probably way too strict and kind of an illusion, but that's just how I run my business.
Mailwizz has all the features you want, plus is multi-tenant, has extensions support and can be hosted for cheap. I'm running it on Webfaction for $10/m.
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:
Not required: I tried Mautic (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