Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Email alternative (github.com)
The idea for this project came out of necessity, as I wanted to share my articles via email newsletter. I was looking for a super minimal, lightweight, and open source solution, and when none existed, I decided to create one.
For any sizable number of email recipients, a popular platform like Mailchimp will easily cost you hundreds or even thousands per month in per-contact fees. rss2newsletter, on the other hand, allows you to use Amazon SES, so you can reach your audience at pennies on the dollar.
Beyond these factors, I also wanted something that could run on an internet-connected potato it's so easy on your system and fully automated so you can set it and forget it.
So, I created (and put under a free software license):
https://github.com/ElliotKillick/rss2newsletter
rss2newsletter (integrating with Listmonk and Amazon SES for ultra-low-cost emails) is a drop-in solution that requires almost no setup besides connecting with SES and styling your emails. It's also competitive at what it does with proprietary self-hosted solutions like Sendy, which requires your system/VPS to have some rather beefy specs to run well.
Let me know if there are any other features you would like to see. I hope you can find my project helpful to you!
37 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadNone of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
From my viewpoint, most of the development in email tools over the last decade has been in the data processing realm.
ie, collecting data or improving the quantity and quality of integrations and then allowing newsletter senders to segment and personalise emails based on that. The more advanced tools allow for proper templating languages and ML based data models such as RFM, recommendation systems, etc.
Newsletters feel like a mostly solved problem with very little further product development required, from where I'm seeing things.
Email doesn't support the general markup you can often expect to see in a blog post and email to rss tools to date haven't offered good means of filtering the output to tidy that up, specifically with things like inlining styles which remains important.
Folks who care about sending good emails quickly realised that the tools just aren't good enough so have resorted to sending the emails separately.
There are obviously other factors at play but that was a big one for me when I looked at the tooling a decade ago when I used SFMC (which offered email to rss functionality).
How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to get right because it seems like Reddit doesn’t want you to use rss
With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard.
Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.
Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs outgrow SES.
Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API.
https://listmonk.app
There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability.
What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.
Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?
The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.
For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it.
iamacyborg's response above is spot on.
Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors.
Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right.
Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders.
Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive.
Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.
It's very challenging to maintain good mailer reputation when you let "the public" use your IP addresses (easier to deal with a dozen enterprise mailers than a million mom-and-pop shops). Some vendors use psychological nudges ("reminder: our contract forbids web-scraped and purchased lists"). Some use technical means to block problematic email addresses. Some buy/scrape lists on the down-low and use them to check if customers are uploading scraped lists...
The reasons why the stats don't include SES is because the target audience for this article is fairly narrow: it is people at orgs that pay for "Marketing Automation" software. That software has capabilities beyond just email sending, and is used for marketing (hence different deliverability challengea than those at SES, which has a broad customer base and can be used for transactional/alerting emails)
Yes, "deliverability" is often used as something vendors use to spook people. It only matters at scale (like >10,000 people per mailing). And many vendors dont actually know what theyre doing.
I'll be glad to answer more questions on this thread or through email (its in my profile)
I use it all the time on feedbin
https://newsletters.love
If anyone wants to give it a try, please give me your feedback!
I built something similar: https://newsletterify.com but is also not really finished. There's a copy cat of my product of which I'm not sharing the link, but I love that there is some competition out there. I love reading newsletters and aggregated information when I have the time, but emails aren't really the medium imho
Please be very clear about your USPs and your target audience.
I really don't get the sentiment on HN that everything should be free, sorry.
That’s not what your parent comment is arguing. The point is that it’s hard to sustain a business against competitors which offer the same thing for free, and the higher your price point the harder it is.
Maybe you aren’t offering the same thing or your service is so much better that it is worth the price, but that’s a different argument.
> And how can they stay free (…), how long do you think they'll stick around and get new features all the time?
I use one of this other services. It is open-source and I don’t know what their costs are, but it’s been working for me for years. I have zero need for more features from them, I’m happy with the simplicity. That I know of they don’t have LLM costs because they don’t use LLMs, and to me that is a plus. If your service is using LLMs, that honestly makes me less interested in it.
So sorry that you're experiencing slowness. I haven't done any performance test on it as for the past few months its mostly been used by just friends and family.
I hope it is faster now.
Tbh, I'm not sure what else to build on top of it as when I built it, I just wanted a safe and private place to be able to curate newsletters without exposing my main email address and allow friends to view my subscriptions.
What do you think feels needs to be touched up? Is it the UI?
for me it definitely is the UI! you could think about adding a UI kit on top of it for a more polished look? and the biggest downturn for me personally is the google login. I wish you good luck with the project mate!