I’ve talked with some folks recently who want to get off of Substack, and was wondering if Mayfirst would consider hosting an e-mail newsletter software in addition to the Mailman mailing list software (which works, but is also a bit clunky, and also more geared towards mailing lists than newsletters in a couple ways).
The two major self-hostable newsletter softwares I’ve seen are Ghost and Keila.
Ghost only integrates with Mailgun for mail-sending. Keila is more flexible, and could perhaps integrate with Mayfirst’s smtp server – but I was also reading this page on the Ghost site, about why it only integrates with Mailgun, and wondering if mayfirst is actually trying to be a reliable bulk e-mail sender? From some of the links they linked, it sounds like being a bulk e-mail sender with high deliverability might require active human relationship management with the big e-mail providers.
Anyway, I had been thinking about this, and what were good alternatives to substack, and was curious if anyone here had also been thinking about that.
Here is the page from Ghost that I referenced:
Why can’t I just use SMTP mail config to send email newsletters with Ghost?
Sending a bulk email to many recipients using basic SMTP will result in your IP address being instantly blacklisted and marked as spam by all mail providers. You should never, ever send bulk mail using basic SMTP, which is why Ghost does not support it.
More info here, and here, and here, and here.
Unfortunately, we have a long list of proposed new services, but at the moment we are focused on ensuring that the services we do host are done properly and are fully supported (e.g. we are currently working on upgrading our hundreds of mailman2 lists to mailman3 - which is our priority over adding a new newsletter service). It’s a bummer because I really like some of the new newsletter sites, especially ghost.
Aside from the mailgun limitation, ghost is at least run via node, which means in theory it could be hosted on our shared infrastructure without out intervention. I’m not sure about Keila (which seems to be written in elexir - I’m not sure anyone has tried to run an elexir app!!).
As for bulk email - yes, it’s a real challenge - something we have been working on for 20 years. And, although no bulk mail provider is perfect, we do fairly well and send a lot of email. These are our stats from the last 7 days:
Part of our success recently is that most of the big players, like Gmail, seem to be using DKIM to rate senders based on their domain rather than the sending IP address. That doesn’t mean we don’t get blocked from time to time (yes, I’m looking at you Yahoo…), but email reputation seems to be increasingly based on the domain of the from address.
As for the unauthenticated smtp - we don’t in fact support unauthenticated smtp - that would be a nightmare. Instead, we authenticate by IP - you can only relay if you are coming from one of our IP addresses. And… that will be changing soon (note above about how we are working on tightening up our existing services before launching new ones!!).
