Melon's Post Office - free newsletter service

[GlitchyZorua]

Perhaps make the post office mobile friendly? I would love to write down new entries on the go! :O

[Blue]

This looked very fun, and I finally sat down and made my own! I have quite a few things I'd like to write for it, some more personal, some more general and some more fandom related (mostly this last one since that's my main thing lol). So, if anyone is interested, Eden news is, in fact, live now to see. I should have the first issue done very soon!

[Captin]

Hey melon, I'm having some issues with the sign up link in the mail room (jeez, its like every time I post here I'm having an issue). Anyway, when I (or my friends) try to sign up for my newsletter they keep getting a "500 Internal Server Error". Its not just my sign up page either, its most of the ones on the public newsletter page too. I'm not sure whats going on and I'm probably missing something but This has been going on for a little while now. Sorry if my requests are getting repetitive but I'm just asking for some assistance. Thank you!

[thefanciestpigeon]

this is so cool! I am also getting the 500 Internal Server Error, however if it works for u, I have made my own list, birds I saw for sending *you* pictures of birds I have saw (very good deal, don't miss out)

[Melooon]

having some issues with the sign up link

I am also getting the 500 Internal Server Error

Oops Apologies! I was adding in some code to help filter out spam signups and I typoed I will try to be more careful next time and check my work! It should be fully functional again now!

[theinvertedform]

melon i think this service you are providing is not only very kind and generous to the community, but i also find it very technically impressive. obviously melonland.net is all extremely impressive, you are a master, but how did you achieve it? what's your delivery rate like? do you find email providers are often marking messages as spam? you mentioned earlier in the thread that you are not allowing importing email lists in order to not damage your sender reputation ... it's kinda risky to be sending community newsletters from the same address, isn't it? if melonland went viral tomorrow and there were a big influx of members, would you need to limit people signing up for the newsletter service in order to protect the sending reputation?

please excuse me if i'm being too nosy ... i'm just really impressed and i'm curious about the technical setup. i set up a listmonk newsletter for myself on my server and using AWS SES, mostly as a learning experiment ... it was a real pain tbh, but i could see it being scriptable (by someone with more knowledge than me).

[Melooon]

but how did you achieve it? what's your delivery rate like? do you find email providers are often marking messages as spam?

It's actually a really simple system; the site you see is just a classic PHP site that lets you make lists, and write newsletters, and handles signups (PHP just emails an agree template to someone each time they signup using mail())

There's a backend SQL database with all the lists, newsletters and signups. When you mark a newsletter for sending, a copy of that newsletter is made for each subscriber in a big outbox table. Then there's a super small NodeJS script that runs in the background and checks the outbox table for pending messages, it goes through each one, sending it via Postfix (I think) and flags it as sent.

I set it up over a year ago and more or less have not had to touch it since so I actually don't remember exactly, but I think I just googled "How to host an Ubuntu mail server and followed the guide"

It was tricky getting the emails to sign themselves properly so they don't get flagged as spam. mail-tester.com gives you a lot of good info about how spam-ish your emails are. This site is hosted by a small company, so they were willing to assign the IP address to be "owned" by melonland.net meaning its much more trusted than a generic VPS would be. I think I watched all the harry potter films back to back while setting all that up.

As for your questions, I frankly dont care As far as I can see newsletters always send, they don't get dropped on my end. I have no idea if emails get marked as spam, it would depend on the provider and how the person has trained there spam filter. Again not really my issue - if someone wants to read my newsletter, they better make sure they can read it

As a whole I just wanted to be able to send newsletters with HTML and no weird restrictions, and no service was offering that for a fair price that made sense for an indie site owner. So I was gonna make the newsletter service anyway, putting in a little extra to make it usable by other melonlanders was a bit more time, but not that much more, and I enjoy all the silly newsletter people make.

I don't think an overload of people will be an issue, its actually a very underused feature; but if it overloads some day that could be fun and can be dealt with at the time.

I'm definitely not a master at anything, but I am good at connecting things and not worrying about them breaking