Are you happy with Mailgun? Poll and thread about emailing in ghost

Memberships & subscriptions
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Before you vote please read below

  • I want to use my own mail server of choice (custom SMTP)
  • I will continue using Mailgun regardless of the price increase
  • I want an alternative to Mailgun that works similarly

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As many other have stated, Mailgun is no longer free, and in fact it looks like they are gonna discard the “cheap” flex plan and have the 35$ plan as the cheapest option in the near future (this is not fully confirmed though). This unfortunate event will make it impossible to use ghost for free unless you don’t care about emailing your readers. I have personally successfully hosted a instance of ghost for free on heroku, with free couldinary integration and no longer free emailing. This is very sad as it means that a lot of potential hobby bloggers will not go with ghost as it is a tremendous deal breaker that you have to register a credit card, this means that kids cannot easily use it, and it means that people in countries where finance infrastructure is limited also have a great disadvantage, I personally think that that is a loss for everyone, the more people on the platform the better it will grow…

I’m gonna sum up pros and cons for each option in the poll now…

I want to use my own mail server of choice (custom SMTP)
This can be done very easily, and 100% free. I have personally setup a yandex account and connected my domain to that, I have then pointed my mailing from my dns to that yandex server, and configured nodemailer to authorize against my noreply@…com which I can also manage from yandexs webinterface. Yandex is a russian service, I know that there are a few alternative that I havent tested, but I can confirm that yandex works and is 100% free, and you can have up to a thousand custom domain email addresses. Please share your experience on alternative services in this thread. This solution is currently not an option and would require the ghost developers to implement such feature, however, this is kind of already built into the source code, you can currently use custom mailserver with custom email domain for admin email, just not the members.

I will continue using Mailgun regardless of the price increase
This is obviously the easy choice, requires no configuration or effort, just a little more pennies out of your pocket, This would probably be the ideal choice for people with blogs that are generating a solid revenue, paying for services that you use a lot is both fair and often the best choice. For people with no money this is not an option, for young people that can’t have a credit card this is not possible. etc. It as also not nice for hobby bloggers that are not trying to run a money business but simply want to share thoughts and information on the otherwise free internet.

I want an alternative to Mailgun that works similarly
There are other services around than mailgun, for example mailchip and sendgrid, however I do not know whether these alternative requires credit card or not, it can also not be guaranteed that they wont do the same as mailgun and up prices. There could be other services out that they would make a good candidate. Please share your knowledge on this matter in this thread.

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As explained elsewhere on the forum the main reason we’re using Mailgun is for future functionality that we’re building into Ghost to give you insights into audience engagement and analytics. Currently no other bulk provider offers similar access to what we need via their API so we’re starting with Mailgun. Members is in beta so things are being kept as restricted as possible so that core functionality can be built out without a lot of the over engineering needed to support adapters for multiple providers.

Bulk mail is also very difficult to do properly without damaging sender score/reputation at the scale our target audience will be using members with. Sticking with a provider that properly handles bulk email (not transactional, or ad-hoc smtp) removes a lot of those issues for the much larger non-technical audience than the smaller but vocal minority of technical users.

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I apologize for making you repeat yourself, I just really missed a poll in the other thread so I started this one dedicated to discuss and analyze whether it is an actual need or not. I agree that bulk emailing is tricky, and I would personally go with Mailgun or use AWSs emailing service IF I had a big blog with tons of readers. That’s not my case, I will be sending a very very limited amount of bulk emails, And I have a gut feeling that the majority of ghost users are in the same situation, that they do not have hundreds or thousands of readers, and therefore mailguns bulk handling is less needed and too expensive.

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(Bump) Does anyone know if ghosts’ plan is still to keep mailgun as the only mailing option? I’m still stuck with a blog that I cannot release until I hand over large monthly monies to mailgun, or until we would be allowed to use either a free (or at least cheap) bulk mail service, or use our own custom mail server.

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