Why I Built My Own Mailing List Software

This is not a tutorial. If you don’t already know how to write the code you need to run a mailing list, you probably shouldn’t try to do it yourself. Still, I wanted to outline the reasons I built my own mailing list software in 2020, when there are dozens of commercial and open source projects that I could have used.

The short answer is that when I plan to use something as a core piece of what I do, I like to understand it completely. The only way to really understand a thing is to either build it yourself from scratch or completely disassemble it and put it back together.

This is true for software as well as the rest of the world. I ripped all the electrical, propane, plumbing, and engine systems out of my home (a 1969 RV) because I needed to know how every single piece works and how they all work together. I understand them now, and that makes maintaining them much easier. Otherwise I would always be defendant on someone else to keep my home running.

The same is true with software. If the software you’re considering is a core part of your personal or business infrastructure, you need to understand every single part of it and how all those parts fit together.

The question is, should you deconstruct an existing project or write your own from scratch? The answer depends on the situation, the right choice won’t always be the same. I do a mix a both and I’m sure most other people do too. There’s no one right answer, which means you have to think things through in detail ahead of time.

When I decided I wanted to start a mailing list, I looked around at the software that was available and very quickly realized that I had different goals than most mailing list software. That’s when you should write your own.

The available commercial software did not respect users privacy and did not allow me any control. There are some services that do provide a modicum of privacy for your subscribers, but you’re going to be working against the software to enable it. If you know of a dead simple commercial mailing list software that’s built with user privacy in mind, please post a link in the comments, I’d love to have somewhere to point people.

A big part of privacy is that I wanted to be in control of the data. I host my own publishing systems. I consider myself a writer first, but publisher is a close second. What sort of publisher doesn’t control their own publishing system?¹

Email is a wonderful distributed publishing system that no one own. That’s okay, I don’t need to control the delivery mechanism, just the product at either end. And email is more or less the inverse of the web. You send a single copy to many readers, rather than many readers coming to a single copy as with a web page. The point is, there’s no reason I can’t create and host the original email here and send out the copies myself. The hard part — creating the protocols and low-level tool that power email — was taken care of decades ago.

With that goal in mind I started looking at open source solutions. I use Django to publish what you’re reading here, so I looked at some Django-based mailing list software. The two I considered most seriously were Django Newsletter and Emencia Django Newsletter. I found a few other smaller projects as well, but those seem to be the big two in what’s left of the Django universe.

Those two, and some others influenced what I ended up writing in various ways, but none of them were quite what I wanted out of the box. Most of them still used some kind of tracking, whether a pixel embedded in the email or wrapping links with individual identifiers. I didn’t want either of those things and stripping them out, while staying up-to-date with upstream changes would have been cumbersome. So, DIY then.

But running a mail server is… difficult, risky, and probably going to keep you up at night. I tried it, briefly.

One of the big problems with email is that, despite email being an open protocol, Google and other big corps are able to gain some control by using spam as a reason to tightly control who gets to send email² That means if I just spin up a VPS at Vultr and try to send some emails with Postfix they’re probably all going to end up in, best case, you Spam folder, but more likely they’d never be delivered.

So while I wrote the publishing tools myself, host the newletter archive myself, designed everything about it myself, I handed off the sending to Amazon’s SES, which has been around long enough, and is used by enough big names that mail sent through it isn’t automatically deleted. It may possibly still end up in some Spam folders, but for the most part in my early testing (thank you to all my friends who helped out with that) that hasn’t been an issue.

In the end what I have is a fairly robust, loosely-joined system where I have control over the key elements and it’s easy to swap out the sending mechanism down the road should I have problems with Amazon SES.

Was it Worth It?

So far absolutely not. But I knew that when I started.

I could have signed up for Mailchimp, picked some pre-made template, and spent the last year sending out newsletters to subscribers, and who knows, maybe I’d have tons of those by now. But that’s okay, that was never the goal.

I am and always have been playing a very long game when it comes to publishing. I am building a thing that I want to last the rest of my life and beyond if I can manage it.

I am patient. I am not looking for a ton of readers, I am looking for the right readers. The sort of people who are in short supply these days, the sort of people who end up on a piece like this and actually read the whole thing. The people for whom signing up for Mailchimp would be too easy, too boring.

I am looking for those who want some adventure in everything they do, the DIYer, the curious, the explorers, the misfits. There’s more of us than most of us realize. If you’re interested feel free to join our club.