Web · 2016-04-07

‘Mailtrain’ is an open source newsletter & mailing list app – #Startup

newsletter app

Mailing lists are the mainstay of Online marketing campaigns, & managing them can get complex & unwieldy. The alternative is to use a provider like Mailchimp, but if your lists are large, it does get costly. This is where ‘Mailtrain’ can be a good alternative, offering outstanding automation & analytics at a more affordable price point. + it’s free.

With Mailtrain you can manage very large mailing lists of millions of subscribers, allowing you to add them manually or import from CSV.  There is also support for custom fields, including text fields, numbers, drop downs & checkboxes. Any of these fields can be included in the newsletters through merge tags.

One of the more interesting features of the app is the ability to segment lists by sending mail only to subscribers that match segmentation rules that you predefine, so you don’t have to make separate lists with small differences to segment your lists. Another feature is the ability to create landing pages for things like unsubscribing, since, for example, every email sent gets a unique unsubscribe URL which if you visit it you get unsubscribed from the list.

Mailtrain is a free open source app, built on Nodemailer, Node.js (v5+) & MySQL (v5.5+ or MariaDB), under a GPL v3 license. You can self-host or use any provider, like Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun & others, as long as they support the SMTP protocol.  It does handling of bounce & complaints via Webhooks for Amazon SES, Mailgun & SendGrid.

Mailtrain does not have a complete feature set when you compare it to Mailchimp, but its developers have a detailed roadmap in place that includes reports, API access & a bunch more stuff. Full source code is available on Github & can be installed on Linux OS distributions. Perusing the Github page, 1 gets the impression that it may be a little risky to bet your business on this app, as they list the following cons there:

  • Alpha-grade software. Might or might not work as expected
  • Awful code base, needs refactoring
  • No tests
  • No documentation

 

 
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
 
Image Credit: Mailtrain
 
 
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