Use ListMonk and ForwardEmail as Mailgun Alternative

Integrations & API
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Hello! Thank you so much for your great work on Ghost!

I have been keeping an eye on the project for a while, looking forward to migrating off of Substack and onto a self-hosted Ghost instance.

I have one minor issue holding me back. Relying on MailGun.

I understand that bulk email is a tricky thing, and we certainly don’t want people trying (and failing) to use a standard SMTP server.

However, being locked into a non-open-source option like MailGun is a bummer.

I would love to explore what an integration with ListMonk and ForwardEmail would look like.

They are already well integrated with each other. Listmonk Newsletter Setup with Forward Email SMTP 2026

So I think the bridge from Ghost is really just to ListMonk?

I have seen two attempts so far.

Neither appear to be actively maintained. But they both appear to mostly just be translating Ghost Webhooks into ListMonk API calls. Is that the suggested approach, or is there room for a cleaner integration? I could see ListMonk being a boon for many Ghost users. Not only the potential of freeing them from Mailgun, but the analytics and other features as well would pair very nicely.

Looking for any sorts of interest, advice or related experiences. Thank you!

1 Like
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I think the current working approach is to use SSO like Authentik (building the tools to enable Ghost into it) and probably adding some webhooks triggers.

You can also get use of tools like N8N, ListMonk have a good API and (almost) webhooks to interact with.

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Alternatively, you can setup a custom Mailgun compatible API. This means spinning up a service that acts like the mailgun api endpoints used by Ghost, configured with your own email service provider. The benefit here is that it’s just a configuration change in ghost, + a lightweight service you maintain.

The only way this would be easier or at least less friction is if a provider like ForwardEmail helped solve for this specific scenario and ran the services themselves for their customers (like me). This would mean customers would just need to copy over the custom api endpoint, username and key the way you normally do for mailgun. They’d run the mailgun compatible api. I’d drop mailgun in a heartbeat if they did that.