Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

by freekmurze • 6 years ago

149 58 6 years ago

lykr0n2• 6 years ago

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

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.

robjan3• 6 years ago

PHP is getting a lot better these days. There is still a lot of clunky legacy syntax but the performance and features are pretty much on par with other scripting languages now.

penagwin• 6 years ago

The latest versions of PHP aren't too bad.

That said Node.js has IMO an interesting architecture because it's event driven, combine that with Typescript and it's solid.

Python type support, and event driven frameworks (e.g. async/await) were only (fairly) recently made accessible, there's a few frameworks that can utilize it well like FastAPI, but many of the popular ones like Django are still behind on async/await support for the a lot of features like the ORM and still is lacking typing support. IMO the python web development system is going to be really awesome once Django gets robust types and async support.

Disclaimer: Current job uses python/Django and js. I have little experience with other languages/frameworks.

Isinlor3• 6 years ago

PHP is a very good choice. If you want to refresh your knowledge of PHP take a look here: 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/

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/

Having said that, Wordpress and other old code bases are still a mess. But stable mess, and business like stable :) .

mikece• 6 years ago

I understand not wanting to write PHP for an app I have to maintain as part of my daily work, but for something like this where you want to sell it to anyone and have it run anywhere, it's hard to be more universal than "PHP and MySQL" (though it does make me smile when SQLite is an option as well).

mekster• 6 years ago

When you can't exactly tell what was bad about PHP, then it may just be an impression given to you from a lousy programmer who would just blame the tools instead or from some messy code which apparently isn't the fault of the language.

What's wrong about it really?

If you're an author of an opensource web app, it's a smart choice to pick PHP to have as much audience as you could get. PHP is the primary candidate for any VPS.

thomasedwards• 6 years ago

Useful for those a bit annoyed by Mailchimp deleting accounts without reason (Previously on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866)

buboard3• 6 years ago

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

CallMeMarc2• 6 years ago

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/

brenden2• 6 years ago

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.

buboard3• 6 years ago

probably depends on the amount of mails you send. i have done this with thousands of emails from a dedicated server and they didn't end up in spam

sneak2• 6 years ago

Sadly, Google will flag as spam most new email servers by default. Email deliverability is a cartel these days.

greenie_beans• 6 years ago

yeah, came here to ask -- how do you not end up in the gmail spam folder?

jpalomaki• 6 years ago

One reason is that the services are actually quite cheap if you are running a real business. Likely better to spend time on your core thing instead of tinkering with mail server.

continuations• 6 years ago

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?

robjan3• 6 years ago

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

buzzert• 6 years ago

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

rolleiflex• 6 years ago

I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (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.

Tomte2• 6 years ago

I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it".

I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.

corobo• 6 years ago

Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP

PetahNZ• 6 years ago

Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.

masukomi3• 6 years ago

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."

shortj• 6 years ago

I'll never understand why they haven't fixed that. A while ago I ended up writing a little patch that parallelized list sends with Redis backing things and some worker processes. Took me maybe a day of work. If I remember right we were easily getting a few hundred sends a second, could have easily gone faster. Default Sendy was a few a second on the same machine/resources. SES can support tremendous send rates if you get limit lifts from AWS.

ocdtrekkie• 6 years ago

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

stiray• 6 years ago

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?

masukomi3• 6 years ago

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...

brian_herman__• 6 years ago

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

gramakri• 6 years ago

We send our newsletters via 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?

locusm• 6 years ago

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

spiddly9• 6 years ago

it does support plain smtp for sending

source: I bought it

mahesh_rm• 6 years ago

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

filesystemdude• 6 years ago

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.

anonme4ever• 6 years ago

Open alternatives :

- https://mailtrain.org/

And more like mailgun :

- https://postal.atech.media/

Both hosted and easy to use.

Show HN: A self-hosted email engine

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