from Hacker News

Show HN: Listmonk – Fast self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager

by v512 on 7/12/19, 3:08 PM with 50 comments

  • by knadh on 7/12/19, 4:47 PM

    Author here. To give some context on why listmonk was built, at work (regulated financial business), we have to deliver e-mails, mostly important updates, to 1.5mn+ customers regularly. We used phpList for the longest time and then tried MailTrain and Sendy before finally deciding to reinvent the wheel after running into a number of issues, of which, a few important ones are mentioned below.

    - Performance. Unreasonably long amounts of time to send out e-mails. phpList degraded to the point of taking several days to process a campaign. listmonk can spawn N goroutines (~threads) and push e-mails to multiple SMTP servers. On a commodity ec2 instance, we're able to send 1.5mn+ e-mails in a couple hours.

    - Subscriber imports were extremely slow. Direct integration to keep subscribers in sync with external CRMs was cumbersome. Direct DB inserts were complicated due to the complex table structures. listmonk imports 10k records/sec into a Postgres DB on a commidty ec2 instance.

    - Segmentation. Often, we have to rapidly segment users by custom attributes and conditions and relay an update to them. listmonk supports SQL expressions to segment users on their attributes that are defined as arbitrary JSON maps (thanks to Postgres JSONB type).

    - Unavailability of dynamic templates. listmonk templates support Go template expressions so it's possible to write logic in messages to make them dynamic.

    I would like to add that listmonk is still work in progress and requires a number of essential features before it can come out of alpha.

  • by samtuke on 7/12/19, 5:47 PM

    phpList CEO here. Listmonk looks awesome - great to see more freedom of choice for Open Source Marketers.

    Not sure what SMTP setup you had with phpList, but sending 1.5m messages on a VPS should take less than a day with the right Postfix tweaks.

  • by OzzyB on 7/12/19, 4:37 PM

    This is relevant to my interests +1

    This looks like the free/open-source version to Sendy based on more modern tech like Golang/Docker/etc I've been hoping for, congrats on your alpha release!

  • by hemancuso on 7/12/19, 3:50 PM

    Projects like this seem like a great idea, but deliverability seems like a big concern that is hard to measure unless you have a reasonable amount of experience.

    What are best practices for using/selecting an ESP if you were to use a project like this and want to ensure reasonable deliverability?

  • by justkez on 7/12/19, 4:57 PM

    Looks great! Do you have any plans to support third-party sending APIs (e.g. SES)? I see the reference to SMTP.

    I've been looking for a good solution for ad-hoc email campaigns (w/ templates) and for sending "systems" emails to an audience of customers.

    I currently look after lists on both MailChimp and EmailOctopus and get frustrated by the flat pricing for the size of the list and not how you engage with the list (e.g. I'd love to see: store your list for $X/mo, or pay $X + (list size * $Y) in the months when you email the list).

  • by OJFord on 7/12/19, 3:54 PM

    Does the AGPL licence mean that every email (the recipient being a 'network user') needs a 'sent with listmonk, source code is here' footer?
  • by webbie917 on 7/13/19, 1:01 AM

    Pretty cool. Does the tool process bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes, e.g. auto removes from future mailings?

    Have you considered using a hosted platform that uses Amazon SES rather then hosting Sendy or other tools yourself? I own BigMailer and our clients with established SES accounts (high daily rate limits > high limit per sec) see 1m emails go out in a little over 1 hour.

    I always wonder why people choose to host email software in house and it seems like the requirement for direct integration with in-house system(s) is one of the biggest considerations when choosing in-house vs. off-the-shelf solution.

  • by good-idea on 7/12/19, 9:02 PM

    This looks great and is maybe exactly what I'm looking for! I have a couple questions:

    I don't see anything in the docs about supplying an unsubscribe link. I don't see an endpoint in the API that could be used with an anchor tag in the footer of the email. Is this something that is supported?

    And: my client is concerned about email/spam regulations, which I'm very unfamiliar with. Is there anything I'd need to look out for in this regard?

  • by zachruss92 on 7/12/19, 4:45 PM

    This is pretty cool. I have been using a competitor's software, Mautic for quite some time. I am excited to see where this goes!
  • by sukh on 7/12/19, 5:44 PM

    Not much to add. Had a quick glance at the code and set it up. Nice work on the single binary install and UI!
  • by paulcarroty on 7/12/19, 8:35 PM

    Upvote for AGPL v3.
  • by goberoi on 7/13/19, 3:24 AM

    Totally random question: how did you pick the name?