As it says. I’m beginning to get the impression that there is no facility for sending single emails. Sure, single transaction emails are sent (via SMTP in my case) when someone subscribes, but can I access the same interface to send single emails?
@quac Ghost supports transactional emails and bulk emails (newsletters). Transactional emails handle subscriber sign ups, and bulk emails allow you to deliver newsletters to your audience or a segment of your audience.
What is your use case? Maybe I’m able to suggest a tool or integration :)
Small blog, currently less than 20 subscribers. Maybe it will get to 100. I use kingmailer as my mailer, but that prohibits bulk sending, e.g., newsletters. Given that I have so few subscribers, I looking to set up some sort of loop across my subscribers, sending emails one at a time.
I’m thinking about doing that within an integration (if I can find sufficient documentation about the internals of integrations) that emulates a bulk send with such an email loop. That would , I assume allow me to use the facilities for creating a newsletter.
Any hints gratefully accepted.
@quac are you using Ghost(Pro) or self-hosting?
Even though you have a smaller number of subscribers, I’d still recommend using Ghost’s email newsletter functionality to deliver newsletters. If you’re using Ghost(Pro), email delivery is handled for you. If you’re self-hosting you can read the mail config guide here.
Email newsletters in Ghost are designed to make it easy to write posts and deliver them as emails.
If you don’t want to use Ghost to deliver emails, then you can always integrate your Ghost publication with an email service provider of your choice.
Hi Kym,
I’m self-hosting. My email provider is kingmailer, which does not support bulk email sending.
Is the code for an email integration available anywhere? Has any such code been posted, to your knowledge, on the forum (which is where applications for inclusion in the gallery are made, I believe)? I’m looking for a template that I can use to write an integration.
Do integrations depend on webhooks?
Is there a webhook associated with sending a bulk email?
If not, where do integrations get their data?
Or is it just the case that it is impossible to send newsletters except through mailgun, and that there is no alternative?
If you’re self-hosting then you’ll need to use Mailgun to setup bulk mail in Ghost. Read more: Why do I have to set up Mailgun for newsletters?
Otherwise, you can also sync your members in Ghost with an external email service provider, and use that to send email instead of Ghost. Here’s some integration tutorials for the most popular ones.
Hi Kym.
What’s frustrating here is that no-one associated with Ghost seems to want to come out and say that if you want the newsletter facility, you MUST have a Mailgun account.
There does not even appear to be a webhook for the newsletter. If so, this is a closed shop. Do the Ghost developer have an arrangement with Mailgun to force Ghost newsletters to go through Mailgun?
The post I shared specifically answers both of these questions. Please read the FAQ I linked to.
Kym,
That FAQ was the source of all my problems.
I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that?
You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.
What that said to me was that I could use the built-in newsletter creation facility without using the built-in newsletter delivery facility, as long as I create the appropriate integration. Great! So I can create a newsletter according to the instructions.
https://ghost.org/help/email-newsletters/
Then I can create an integration for bulk-sending these newsletter through some other mailer.
However, I can find nothing about an integration to do this.
What about:
Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services
?
The use of the word ‘newsletter’ leads me to believe that the topic is newsletters created within Ghost…
Seems pretty straightforward. But,
You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider…
This document is as clear as a rhino’s mud bath.
What I want to do is integrate a newsletter and the list of recipients, which I have created in Ghost, to an external mailer.
When I look at the available events in the webhooks documentation, there is no corresponding event. When I look at Zapier+Ghost
Available events and actions
The available trigger events in the Ghost Zapier Integration are:
- Post published
- Page published
- Member created
- Member updated
- Member deleted
The available actions are:
- Create post
- Create member
- Find author
there is nothing that corresponds to what I want.
The conclusion I draw, not from the FAQ, but from many attempts to find a way to do what the FAQ suggests I can do, is that there is no way I can do it.
This should be made crystal clear in all the documents where the word ‘newsletter’ occurs.
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I think there may have been a misunderstanding about what I said earlier:
you can also sync your members in Ghost with an external email service provider
And what the FAQ mentions:
You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.
If you want to use an external email service to deliver email, then you can. This works by syncing your member database in Ghost with your external mail provider. Put another way - you would need to deliver your email newsletters using their service.
The integration between Ghost and your email provider would exist to make sure any subscribers who sign up on your Ghost site are sent to your email provider.
I’m not familiar with kingmailer - but if they don’t support bulk mail then it sounds like you’ll need to pick another tool. If you want to use Ghost’s native email newsletter feature as a self-hosted user, then you’ll need a Mailgun account.
The main problem here is that you want to use a service in a way it was never designed or meant to be used. This is clearly stated on KingMailer’s website. I will quote a few snippets from the website.
It’s for sending transactional e-mails.
Kingmailer SMTP offers transactional SMTP service, that let’s you send, receive and route/ forward emails.
It’s not for sending mass mail or newsletters.
20,000 emails per month. Unlimited recipients. For Routing & Transactional emails only. Not for sending mass mail or newsletters. Have questions? Send us an email info@kingmailer.co.
It’s not for sending mass mail or newsletters.
Can I use this SMTP service for sending mass / bulk mail?
No, we do not offer our service for sending mass / bulk mail.
It’s not for sending mass mail or newsletters.
Can I upload my list here and start emailing?
No. We do not provide a way for customers to upload their subscribers onto our platform. Also, we do not allow mass mail/ bulk mail newsletters.
You could of course invest time and energy in finding a way to use it in a new way, but I won’t be of much help to you I’m afraid. This applies to both KingMailer and Ghost.