You can now send email newsletters with Ghost

Members (beta)
#1

Hey everyone! This week we announced support for native email newsletters in Ghost!

We worked on this in Thailand on our last team retreat a few weeks back to get an MVP put together, then spent a few weeks after the retreat polishing it and ironing out the bugs. It’s actually pretty stable and far along now, but keep in mind that it’s still just a first version :slight_smile:

This is another step toward making it as easy as possible to run a publication with an engaged community. It’s now possible to build publications like Stratechery or The Information without needing any 3rd party software.

We have some more updates to members based on your feedback coming in the next couple of weeks, too (including theme helpers for members to cancel their own subscriptions!).

We’re also planning to release more free, open source, members-ready themes to make it easier to spin up new sites for various use cases. Definitely planning to have strong themes for both free newsletters (like publisherweekly.org) and paid newsletters (like substack). Are there any other types-of-site that you think would be interesting? Maybe a patreon-ish type theme could work too, for people who want more of a news-feed + supporters feel.

Anyway here’s the post with all the details of newsetters beta:

17 Likes
#2
#3

Hello,

Is it possible to send emails with my own Emailserver?

1 Like
#4

I would like to see a theme focused on learning experiences (i.e. use the Members feature for an LMS type of website) or integrations with existing LMS’s, such as Teachable, etc.

2 Likes
#5

Fantastic, more and more happy with the choice I made using Ghost.

The first most important step I believe is to implement the unsubscribe functionality by users.

It would be interesting a theme that implements the Stripe Product API.

Giving the possibility to sell/download for free digital products from the blog

#6

Now it is not possible yet. I have created a post for this feature request here.
You can vote up the issue to raise the priority of being able to send your Ghost email newsletters with your own email server.

#7

John, this is great news all around. Enticed by your addition of Membership, I’ve been learning the platform and forming a short wishlist of features like send by email, allow members to cancel/modify their subscription, email template editing, email tracking, etc.

The thing is, you keep delivering these things one step ahead. It’s awesome. Please keep going!

2 Likes
#8

Look here. Set it up and it works https://forum.ghost.org/t/setting-up-email-newsletters-with-your-own-email-server/10664/4?u=happyfeet01

#9

This is amazing! A pleasant surprise for the weekend. Bye-bye to convoluted posts-to-RSS-to-MailChimp-to-email webhook chains that could break anywhere along the way. If I wasn’t using Ghost already, this would have totally convinced me to switch :tada:

Kudos to the team for brainstorming and implementing it so fast! :clap: :clap:

2 Likes
#10

Customization of email templates for Ghost (Pro) would be excellent…

#11

Thank you, it’s a good progress.

If we want to send bulk email using Ghost’s built-in functionality then the only option right now is to use Mailgun.

Even if we understand that all these functions are currently in beta version, we can argue that it is very/too much target with Mailgun.
This can make us think of a commercial partnership.

In order to keep the impartiality and freedom that Ghost gives us, it would be desirable that we can use these features with other services as well as our own SMTP server for those who host on their own server to ensure that all PII remains in the desired region and complies with local laws (example: GDPR for Europe, 242-FZ for Russia etc.).

In any case, thank you to all the team to listen to the users and developers in order to make Ghost evolve by answering at best to the expectations while preserving this basic base which made its fame and its strength.

And Happy New Year.

#12
#13

This is a cool feature. Is there a way to resend the email for a post?

I’m using the Casper theme on one of my sites. I sent out a newsletter to my members, then added more members. Is there a way to resend the newsletter so that it goes to the new members?

When I revert the post back to an unpublished draft, there’s no longer an option to send the email when I try to publish it again.

A temporary solution is to copy-paste the post into another post and resend it that way.

#14

One of the best features I’ve seen come out, so much so that I’m experimenting with Ghost now - coming from WordPress!

But I’d love to see a strong / simple (yet comprehensive) clean / starter theme for the membership feature. I’ve seen Pico, but its missing elements.

Will be happy to share my thoughts over time, I really see potential in Ghost (now if we could only make the installation easier for normal humans :slight_smile:

#15

Glad you like it! Totally agree about about making it easier to get started with in general, particularly themes.

Installation is kind of a solved problem — People who are comfortable with modern app development are very used to how Ghost’s setup process works, and people who aren’t can get a very easy 1click experience with Ghost(Pro) and not think about it :slight_smile:

1 Like
#16

This was an indispensable thing for me and I worked very hard on integration.

I’m very happy with this news!

#17

can I add multiple posts in an email ? is that possible and if yes , how