Postcard is now open source

philip1209 122 points contraption.co

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nanna

This looks great but delivery via Amazon SES is a problem. I'm an academic and I tried to set up a work newsletter like this with Listmonk recently, but SES rejected my request to relieve me of sandbox mode for unspecified 'security reasons'. Everything was set up properly, it was under a domain under my personal name, I gave links to my profile page on my university website, ample explanation about what I would do with it (one email ever few months), that I would be the only sender, but they rejected it. So in the end I've opted for a hosted solution... anyone else had similar issues?

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philip1209

Postcard originally used Postmark. But, Postmark deliverability has been decreasing. And, for the open-source version, I wanted to simplify dependencies. So, I moved it to SES. It works for small lists, but won't scale to massive ones.

I welcome PRs to add additional sending providers - it wouldn't be onerous.

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keysdev

Would be nice to have just send using sendmail or what ever smtp server we chose. This is HN, and some of us have already done ip warming and to avoid any big players, as they all drop/block emails without telling their users and are not be trusted for reliable communication.

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Nextgrid

SMTP is a must. My advice is to never bother with proprietary mailer APIs - you will need to change providers sooner or later (sometimes on short notice, if your current provider temporarily suspended you on a false positive for example), which is much easier when you just need to swap the SMTP credentials vs implementing yet another proprietary API. Plus it makes local testing easier - there's no shortage of "fake SMTP for development" projects out there.

Of course, tech bros don't want you to do it, as it reduces their vendor lock-in.

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philip1209

That's fair, I can add smtp config.

Really I was just concerned about configuration overload from too many options. Seems like SMTP is worth splitting out, though.

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Nextgrid

I think SMTP is the way to go unless you're actually using specific proprietary mailer API features and there's no way to do the same via SMTP.

Solution is:

* SMTP by default

* if you want, some setup examples of using third-party mail services using their SMTP endpoint (most offer one)

Again you don't have to, it's an open-source project and you owe nothing to anyone. But if you fancy doing it, this is the way to go and will save headaches later.

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keysdev

And just remember the more HAM you send out to different domains and not SPAM, the better the IP gets overtime. And then BAM you got your own little self hosted poormans mailchimp.

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pirsquare

postmark is a garbage now. This is coming from a previous postmark advocate and moved to SES.

SES is terrible in the past but now it is at least on-par if not better than postmark.

Only issue with SES is setup can be tedious.

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toomuchtodo

What provider doesn’t suck in this space?

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cornfieldlabs

Just 4 years ago, I was recommending Postmark to everyone who faced deliverability issues with sendgrid.

Who's the relatively better provider now?

Edit: A useful article about IP Warm up https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...

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samdung

A few years ago AWS used to be quite generous with SES. As a result it became the source of a lot of spam. Thankfully they started becoming strict since the last 2 years. This along with new features like managed warmup, multi-region sending, has made AWS SES very desirable.

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f_devd

I actually had the same issue getting rejected for SES since I didn't have any reputation or something and ended up re-implementing the SES (and SNS) api for use with a regular IMAP/SMTP server, I intended to clean it up and open-source it but never got to it.

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ethan_smith

For academic newsletters with SES sandbox issues, consider using Mailgun or Postmark which often have more straightforward verification processes and reasonable free tiers for low-volume senders.

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Onavo

Just file an appeal. Their internal process doesn't like it if they have too many rejections. They will eventually approve you.

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dandano

Been a big fan of Postcard, especially seeing how it was another success story of a solo dev making something great using RoR. I’ve been looking through the code base for only 15 mins and I’ve learnt a few things already. Thanks for making this open source!

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austinjp

Psst... it's down for me. Cloudflare error page says SSL handshake failed.

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philip1209

What's failing - the blog? Seems to be working fine for me and my uptime monitoring hasn't caught anything. Hopefully it's a blip!

My hosting setup is . . peculiar: https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/

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robertlagrant

An aside: could you use cloudflare caching to reduce the traffic burden on your Mac Mini?

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npilk

Your original blog post links to www.postcard.page, which throws a Cloudflare SSL error, but the bare domain https://postcard.page appears to work fine.

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philip1209

Ah, thanks. Just pushed a fix for this.

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rmujica

It looks amazing! thanks for sharing. I also enjoyed your self-hosting post, I might give it a try.

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miga

While I admire social-network-friendly websites, I am afraid that performance is too bad to allow its use instead of a social network.

Indeed it is so performance sensitive, that it has blocked my region. Would it not be better to get a static site generator from a standard Markdown posts, and thus assure it is both performant and accessible?

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Abishek_Muthian

I like minimalist self-hosted websites, great choice making Postcard open-source!

May I ask what were your biggest hurdles building the project and what's the most requested feature from your users?

I myself have been building similar project called `Open Payment Host`^[1] for couple of years now, but its focused on payments. Say a self-hosted alternative for Gumroad, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi etc.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host

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sydbarrett74

Thank you, philip1209, for sharing your project. Props. :)

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toomuchtodo

Great work Philip.

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philip1209

Originally shared here in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549267