mailtrain

Mailtrain is a self-hosted newsletter application, meaning you run it on your own server rather than paying for a third-party email marketing service. It is built with Node.js and uses a MySQL or MariaDB database to store subscriber data and campaign information.

The core features include managing lists of subscribers, dividing those lists into segments based on custom criteria, defining custom data fields for subscribers, creating and managing email templates, and importing large subscriber lists from CSV files. Once set up, you can send newsletters to your list through your own email infrastructure.

You can install Mailtrain using Docker (which handles all the dependencies automatically) or by running it manually on any machine that has Node.js installed. The Docker setup involves a few commands to clone the repository, copy a configuration template, and start the service. After it starts, you access it through a web browser at a local address and log in with default credentials that you are expected to change immediately.

The hardware requirements are modest: a single CPU core and 1 GB of RAM is enough to run it.

It is important to know that version 1 of Mailtrain, which this repository contains, has been officially deprecated. The maintainers note that it has security flaws that are unlikely to be fixed, and they recommend switching to Mailtrain version 2, which is available on a separate branch of the same repository. Version 1 is covered under a GPL-V3.0 license for recent releases.