Mailgun alternative

[alexgoldman68]

Is there any plan to provide alternate methods for sending emails?

Having a lot of issues with Mailgun, and additionally their high prices.

Would be nice to have more than one option.

[nicgentile]

I’m still new to Ghost, and I really like it. Have gone from zero hits to paid subscribers and a following in under a month. Still surprised by all that. The only Achilles heel is Mailgun. No idea why it’s the only one when they have such terrible service and support.

There needs a different plan. Right now I am going with Mailchimp + Zapier so there are no statistics coming into Ghost and for such a well-built platform, that just feels wrong.

If the mantra of “no bullshit” stands, then Mailgun should not be the only provider, regardless of the fact that Ghost does not benefit from this. It’s just a terrible service ruining a fantastic product.

[saiunes]

apart from using mailgun, i believe it will be nice to add ses as a second option

[DustinG]

Being required to use Mailgun is possibly the biggest problem with Ghost. Too many emails end up marked as spam, they no longer offer a free pricing tier, and their price plans are expensive, and their customer service is bad.

[Cathy_Sarisky]

Mailgun has a pay as you go plan. It isn’t advertised, but you can downgrade to it at the end of your trial, and it’s super cheap.

How does PAYG billing work?

It’s first 1000 messages/month free, then $1/1000 messages.

Aside: Do you have stats about another bulk mail provider having better deliverability? Genuinely curious. Everything I understand about bulk email delivery is that it’s hard. When I ran my first email server, 20+ years ago, it was pretty easy to turn it on and send email from it. Now? I’m glad it’s not my job.

Ultimately, the Ghost team has decided that supporting an additional email option is not a priority. You can read more about that here: Why do I have to set up Mailgun for newsletters?

[Matt_P]

Deliverability has a lot more to do with the sending domain, the sender, and the list receiving the emails than it does with Mailgun or any other provider. Mailgun is at least conscious of warming up and keeping their sending IPs off of spam blacklists. If your emails are hitting the spam folder, the sender & their habits are the problem more often than not.

[Anuga]

Mailgun for internal newsletter? No no no…

Imagine being a billion dollar company, and choosing to use Ghost as a internal, eller external, blog platform.
Your running your own web/db/proxy/cache servers and your own mailservers.
But you must use a external third party for newsletter sendouts, cause the developers of Ghost, wants you to use, Mailgun…

No no no… ;)

[barnabynagy]

Mailgun is the worst email provider I used so far and their support sucks! Please add other options like sendgrid or others!

See below:

Please add other options!

[block]

Not gonna happen anytime soon I’m afraid. They have other priorities. For now, Mailgun works pretty good for me, but I had to spend some time chatting with the support to let them whitelist my account.

[ratchet]

Sendgrid. Moonmail. Moosend. SMTP2GO. Elastic Email. MailerLite.

[barnabynagy]

What other priorities are more important than this? I did talk to mailgun support without any success to whitelist my account. I even tried their sending limit “business as usual” and they said it doesn’t make them happy. It’s a horrible company. I had to do a zapier integration with brevo. And now my stats are off. Ghost has their priorities off big time

[Cathy_Sarisky]

I’ve had zero problems with Mailgun, but I started with no list when I started my blog, so I never hit their new account sending restrictions. My stats look great and I’m happy not to manage a mail server.

[block]

I believe their priority isn’t necessarily hundreds of thousands of users using their product for free (self hosting); that’s just my perspective. Instead, if you seek a seamless experience without issues, exploring their Pro service might be a worthwhile option. In my only interaction with Mailgun, they did a “KYC” process, inquiring about my business and ensuring compliance with their terms. Now, I have multiple websites sending emails under a single account, and everything works smoothly. Mailgun is an excellent product; following their requirements is key. Sending a modest volume of 1-2 emails per day to avoid hitting limits and subsequently engaging in a conversation with their support can swiftly resolve any issues and get you unblocked.

[andreascreten]

We had a similar issue. Out of frustration, I started working on a fork with Postmark support: 📮 Postmark integration by andreascreten · Pull Request #19398 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub

To make our life easy, we are running the upgrade from a Github Action:

name: Upgrade Ghost From Our Fork
on: workflow_dispatch
jobs:
  upgrade:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        name: 📥 Checkout Ghost
        with:
          repository: madewithlove/ghost
          submodules: true
      - name: 📦 Install dependencies
        run: yarn
      - name: 🗂️ Create archive
        run: yarn archive
      - name: Rename file
        run: mv ghost/core/ghost-*.tgz ghost-from-fork.tgz
      - name: ⬆️ Upload archive to Ghost server
        uses: appleboy/scp-action@v0.1.7
        with:
          host: "XXXXXX"
          username: "ghost-mgr"
          source: "ghost-from-fork.tgz"
          target: "/var/www/ghost"
          key: ${{ secrets.GHOST_SSH_KEY }}
          timeout: 90s
      - name: 🚀 Upgrade Ghost from our archive
        uses: appleboy/ssh-action@v1.0.3
        with:
          host: "XXXXXX"
          username: "ghost-mgr"
          key: ${{ secrets.GHOST_SSH_KEY }}
          script: |
            cd /var/www/ghost
            ghost update --archive=ghost-from-fork.tgz
            rm ghost-from-fork.tgz

[bastien]

Open source alternatives to Mailgun :

• https://docs.postalserver.io/
• https://www.useplunk.com/

[barnabynagy]

Could have worked for that use case but for those of us who have a list already ghost sucks. Big time.

[markstos]

There’s a fork of Ghost that works with Postmark now.

📮 Postmark integration #19398

I’ve left some feedback on it a couple of different times that I think would make it more likely be merged, but the fork author hasn’t replied to the feedback, nor have any official Ghost team members commented on what it take to get the PR into a mergable state. If done well, it would accomplish two things:

1. Set up an “adapter” pattern that allowed for alternate providers to be configured. Mailgun, instead of being hard-coded, would become the first and default user of this adapter pattern.
2. Support Postmark as an alternate adapter. One the first step is done, the Postmark support wouldn’t need to be in the Ghost code base at all. It could be published as a separate NPM module and not reviewed or supported by the Ghost team at all.

See my full feedback on the PR here:

markstos

Oh, I see that @andreascreten who authored the Postmark fork is also in this thread. Maybe responding to the PR feedback will help forward support for all non-Mailgun options.

[andreascreten]

Yep

The issue is that I don’t have the time to make the required changes. One of our team members is keeping the fork up to date and solving issues we find while using it.

As long as we don’t get feedback from the Ghost team that they would be open to this in the first place, I don’t think it makes sense to invest more time in it.

[interactivity-studio]

The Grow plugin by Mediavine has a fantastic option to collect emails and hook them to an automated email segment through the Kit API. Plus, everything is free for up to 500 subscribers I believe.

Still, this is a third party tool, so might not feel as native to Ghost.

[bastien]

for such a usecase BestRegards has a native Ghost integration, much better