It’s way past time for Ghost to switch to using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) SendBulkEmail API to power newsletter sending.
The Mailgun requirement in Ghost for sending newsletters is A REAL ISSUE!
Mailgun built their business on a flexible pay for what you send business model. Now, they have changed to a pay to send model with an extremely limited free tier.
The Mailgun requirement permanently stains the Ghost brand, and does not align with the level of excellence the Ghost platform is known for.
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Ghost Pro (which is managed hosting service maintained by core Ghost team) is happy enough with Mailgun and publishers using this (and other) managed services don’t have any issues with Mailgun. I understand the frustration that you have as a self-hoster. But creating an adapter to allow other type of bulk mail services need a big amount of effort. Ghost team said they are open for community PR for a proper newsletter adapter mechanism but no-one made this yet. Working on a feature that you never use (I mean core Ghost team here), is specially difficult. So I understand the position Ghost team takes here.
Besides that, there are some other workarounds to use other bulk mail providers with current Ghost. You may want to check GitHub - tilak999/mailgun-ses-proxy: Proxy server to use AWS SES instead of mailgun in ghost CMS project and @jannis mentioned another PoC he is working on on his blog. If you don’t care email deliverability stats in Ghost admin, actually this proxy method is considerably easy and safe solution.
I hope this helps.
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The thing about posts like these is that everybody considers their feature request a “must have”. For example I wish Ghost had better image storage integrations built-in (like S3 compatible storage) that would allow images to be uploaded to those services and the images would auto-resize and zoom like they do when uploading locally. I feel strongly about it, but I’m not going to say not having it “stains the Ghost brand”.
To further my point, I don’t have any problem with Mailgun, I have a Flex plan and I haven’t paid anything yet for it. It works, and it was easy to set up. I’m ok with it.
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I pay about $0.50 per month, maybe $1/month if I send more newsletters than usual. Folks on the free tier hitting limits need to dig around on the forum for directions for how to get onto Flex. It’s stupid hidden, but it’s there and a great deal for small senders.
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