An open source email campaign management tool for nonprofits | Hacker News Reader

An open source email campaign management tool for nonprofits

github.com

62 pointsfebin17 comments

I've always wondered what the deliverability of mail is that gets sent out from homespun servers with setups like this? I've always assumed it would mostly all end up in spam folders but genuinely curious if anyone has any experience.

It uses Amazon SES as the mail back-end. In other words, Amazon is dealing with the logistics of sending the mails.

And Amazon is pretty aggressive and proactive about spam - if the bounce rate is high (<10%) the SES account gets suspended or shut down, so Amazon servers are not likely to end up on any ISPs black lists.

We (very very small EU NGO) do it. I run an emailing of dozens of thousands emails about once a year - before some elections, we prepare some pre-election tools for people. I use simple php for that, so the setting is actually quite bad with regards to spamfiltering. But we get several percents response rate - people coming to our website and using the tools - the very day I send it, which is very good (and more people later), most of businesses would really like to achieve that, imho.

Set up DKIM and SPF on your domain. Your mails won't go to spam folder.

This is very important and overlooked by many marketers. Your emails need to actually come from the email address you say they are, e.g. the sender should be blah@yourdomain.com and not "via some random server name of your provider".

As others have said, this particular service uses Amazon. But to answer your question, I've supported services where management dictated the process was going to involve an on-premises Exchange server built just for a mail campaign to deliver directly to inboxes.

The answer is, rDNS, SPF, DKIM, abuse.net registry, feedback loops with major mail services - are all memes.

You can do everything right, which is an extremely manual effort once you get as far as building code that identifies the top mail services used by your mailing list and reaching out to ISPs and mail hosts individually and asking them to whitelist you.

And you'll still find deliverability extremely poor.

Even Troy Hunt went in circles trying to get HIBP emails delivered to Microsoft Office 365 users.

This is really fantastic. Do you guys need help with UI? I recently posted this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15257303] where want to help OSS with UI design. You can view some of our work in my bio. This are really the types of projects we want to support, so feel free to reach out.

One of the main things is to try and make it look less like a standard bootstrap theme, and more like something that can measure with software like Mailchimp and the likes. All the way from branding to the tiniest of details.

Thanks for the heads-up on Twitter that someone submitted this to HN. Yes - we'd welcome your help improving the UI. We have a Gitter room: https://gitter.im/freecodecamp/mail-for-good and introduce yourself.

Can't beat free of course, but there are some commercial services that use Amazon SES and are significantly cheaper than market leaders.

BigMailer.io - free tier up to 5K contacts, then $1 per 1K contacts. Features: built-in multi-brand management, support for multiple opt-ins (interest lists), segmentation, signup forms, support for GA tracking, list suppression. On roadmap: AB testing, automation, support for transactional emails (so all your emails are in 1 place). https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/bigmailer-email-marketing-soft...

Anyone who mentions NewsHacker post after account setup will get lifetime 20% discount.

I like that it's open source but frankly Sendy is so cheap that I can't see a big need for this.

https://sendy.co

You would need to have a really big email list to justify maintaining your own server with either open source software or Sendy, which I realize isn't a big deal for developers but you gotta figure your time isn't free, right?

If your list is small-ish, I would suggest to go with a hosted solution like http://BigMailer.io or other similar providers depending on your feature needs.

Both local and AWS deployment guides mention needing to get a Google API key, but not what for. I'm guessing it's for this bullet point:

> Track bounce rate and other standard metrics. You can also insert tracking pixels and unsubcribe links a click of a button.

No, it's because the app uses Google Accounts for authentication.

Are there any plans to set up auto-responders or do tag based lists?

If you create a GitHub issue asking for this and explaining the use cases involved, then sure - we can look into creating this. https://www.github.com/freecodecamp/mail-for-good/issues/new

Done. I opened 2 issues:

Auto-responders: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/196

Tagging: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/197

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