Listmonk

Last updated Nov 20, 2024

Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager. Performance and features packed into a single binary. Free and open source.

My new Newsletter is published with Listmonk on list.ssp.sh. So far I used Mailchimp. I also liked Buttondown, unfortunately, it costs 9$ for above 100 subscribers.

By using open source Listmonk, I have the sending emails and collecting and unsubscribing from a newsletter, which I needed. But I had to deploy it myself. I used Railway.app.

• Head to your dashboard, and select your Listmonk project.
• Select the GitHub deployment service.
• In the Deployment tab, head to the latest deployment, click on the three vertical dots to the right, and select “Redeploy”.

see more on Upgrade - listmonk / Documentation

Check Automated PostgreSQL Backups.

Restoring data from the backup

Our data should is now being automatically backed up to our S3 bucket. If we ever want to restore this data to a database, we can do so very easily using pg_restore.

First, unzip the backup which is stored as a tar.gz file and then run:

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pg_restore -d 'DATABASE_URL' BACKUP_FOLDER

In the above snippet, replace the DATABASE_URL with the connection URL of the database you’d like to restore the data to and the BACKUP_FOLDER with the name of the folder to which you extracted your backup zip file and voila, your backup has been restored!

Sending it with Amazon SES.

Make sure you set up and verify the domain, and set some other settings like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Check Bulk or mass email service for Newsletter and Email Automation.

I think I used these checklists:

• Tutorial: Setting up DMARC, SPF, DKIM with Amazon SES - EmailOctopus knowledge base
  • Alternative: Site Unreachable
• Amazon docs:
  • Email authentication methods - Amazon Simple Email Service
    • Complying with DMARC authentication protocol in Amazon SES - Amazon Simple Email Service
    • Authenticating Email with SPF in Amazon SES - Amazon Simple Email Service
• Set-up bouncing with Amazon SES
  • Bounce processing - listmonk / Documentation

Listmonk does not support automatically sending welcome emails or other messages. It is better to use Email Automation, something like Mautic, as mentioned in the GitHub issue.

A hacky solution with Listmonk on Auto reply on subscription (Issue #206).

The alternative I use for now is PayHip, see on My Services.

Origin: Newsletter
References: listmonk - Free and open source self-hosted newsletter, mailing list manager, and transactional mails, Send Checklist for Reaching Audience
Created 2023-04-09