It sounds like you’ve got a lot of things you’d like this open source project to do. If it’s easy (a “non-issue”), I’d encourage you to open a PR for the mail sending adapter pattern and another service (or two, if you want Gmail and AWS SES) that would plug into that pattern. [See later post – I no longer feel this way.]
Or since you’re self hosting, you could set up your changes to patch Ghost and anyone who wants them could use them, even in the absence of a merge from the Ghost team. Or I’ve seen a couple projects out there that act like translation layers between Ghost and another sending platform in the last couple months, so you might want to see if there’s already something that does what you want.
This is getting into the land of “Why won’t the team build what I want for this software I’m using for free?” There’s a genuine issue here (options for self hosters), but I’m thinking this thread is not currently solving it.
I used to simply have MailChimp sniff my RSS feed and send out a notice every time something new was published. I use Mailgun now and pay the $15/month for my 144 members because … it’s a better experience and more tightly integrated.
Back then, though, I was also not using Ghost’s Membership features. All of my “members” were subscribed to my MailChimp account. But you can likely tie the two together with Zapier. I.e., a person becomes a member on your site and Zapier subcribes them to the MailChimp mailing list. Etc. And I am certain you can do the same thing with MailerLite and any other modern bulk mailer.
Yes, Mailgun, oddly, starts charging at an absurdly low number of sends and … $15/month is the lowest tier? Bizzarre. But I went with them anyway just for the convenience factor.
Good luck.
P.S. A comment about the value of threads like this since one person subtly poo-pooed it. A prior role for me was working for an open source software company for nearly two decades. Feedback like what is found in this thread is indeed important. It is an important datapoint for the development team and for those who love to hack away on open source software. It indentifies an unmet need. And yes, though the user is using the application for free … that doesn’t mean they are less valued. It just means their needs are perhaps lower priority. Or maybe not. Depends. Regardless, that is the nature of the open source beast: both smaller free users and larger paying users contribute to the feature discussion and both need to be adequately served. Cheers!
I would like to have some other options available built in, but the mailgun flex plan works pretty good for me and the other sites im hosting. I have a few that send to greater than 2k recipients and have no problems on the flex plan, curious that some in this thread are having issues with sending to more than 100.
My experience with Ghost CMS was amazing so far. And I will continue to self-host for my own project for my personal needs and reasons. But for all my connections I recommend hosted version of Ghost CMS, because it is much easier to maintain.
I agree with toddw, yes, it is lower priority, but maintaining open-source version of Ghost CMS is important signal for us, developers and gives us a reason to promote your product, idk how much it is useful for you guys.