Anybody rolling their own newsletter? (all or part)
I mean, rather than using mailchimp or substack or buttondown
I think I can:
- write my own html/css for the newsletter
- maintain my own archive of newsletters on my domain
What else do I need?
I mean, rather than using mailchimp or substack or buttondown
I think I can:
What else do I need?
http://www.mayirecommend.email does, and is amazing
A company I worked for used the Sendy (sendy.co) software to self host (sent via AWS SES). That worked reasonably well. The Sendy code is poorly written, however, and the updates are too slow for my taste so if I was going to do it today I'd look at mailcoach.app.
I am.
Unicornsfeed.com with emailoctopus
I am maybe halfway to what you're suggesting? I generate my own HTML (programmatically; it's data-driven stuff) and push it to my mailing list provider (MailerLite, although apparently you can now do the same thing with MailChimp). Then I post the same email (more or less) to my WP site.
Note though that email formatting for HTML emails is a complicated business, and mailing list providers put a lot of work into their drag-and-drop editors to make sure your email looks OK in every mail client under the sun. I actually ended up buying a set of commercial HTML email templates for exactly this reason - for a price which, in retrospect, would have paid for quite a few months' mailing list provider subscription.
You can write your own HTML/CSS with MailChimp and other services. Just curious, why would you want to roll your own?
I guess I was thinking it can't be that hard to send an email out to a list of addresses, especially for a people in a community about independently hacking applications. It feels healthier to send out a newsletter without being tied to yet another platform that dictates how people view my newsletter.
edit: reading up on the button down service, and I wasn't giving enough credit to all the things involved, like spam fighting and engagement with a community. And now thinking about platforms as something to build on and integrate with. Think I'll try it out.
Yeah in addition to spam fighting, there's also deliverability. Source: I used to work at Postmark, whos specializes in email deliverability for apps and has the best delivery rates in the industry by a wide margin.
The way that email inbox providers (think Gmail, Yahoo mail, Outlook, etc) get high quality email to the inbox is by using sender reputations. But you need ot send a LOT of mail to really get a reputation. Like, millions of emails.
When you send with a quality provider, they manage those sender reputations invisibly for you, sending your emails from the same sender IPs of hundreds or thousands of other senders that are sending quality emails, too.
If one sender starts getting spam reports, they get put into a low-quality sending pool, to sort of "quarantine" the problem, and if it continues they might be kicked off the service.
This isn't just complex work, it's something that you literally can't do as an individual unless you're already sending millions of emails.
Folks really underestimate how much goes on under the hood to make email work!
Agreed on spam fighting and deliverability. They’ll also hand-hold you through the right steps to prevent getting your stuff landed in spam, have great documentation, and give you invaluable metrics on your open rates, bounces, unsubscribes and so on.