I'm very disappointed to discover that a self-hosted Ghost can't actually send out newsletters by email.

It provides all the front-end for accepting subscribers and promising them new posts by email, and it's all turned on by default. But to send those emails, you need a paid account with a proprietary mail missile called MailGun.

EDIT: Not really Team Ghost's fault, see below.

(1/?)

#Ghost #email #newsletters #SelfHosting #MailGun

Kia ora @span antsu, just found your blog post about getting ActivityPub working Ghost;

https://blog.antsu.net/finally-got-activitypub-in-ghost/

I'm so confused by this.

"Make sure you have added the ActivityPub subpaths correctly to your reverse proxy. These must all be proxied to ap.ghost.org over HTTPS."

So a self-hosted Ghost instance can't post directly into the fediverse? If so, that's disappointing.

As is the dependence on MallGun to email out newsletters to subscribers.

@span index

#ActivityPub#Ghost#MailGun

Introducing #Upyo!

A simple, cross-runtime email library that works seamlessly on #Deno, #Node.js, #Bun, and edge functions. Zero dependencies, unified API, and excellent testability with built-in mock transport.

Switch between #SMTP, #Mailgun, #SendGrid without changing your code. Available on #JSR & #npm!

https://upyo.org/

Introducing #Upyo!

A simple, cross-runtime email library that works seamlessly on #Deno, #Node.js, #Bun, and edge functions. Zero dependencies, unified API, and excellent testability with built-in mock transport.

Switch between #SMTP, #Mailgun, #SendGrid without changing your code. Available on #JSR & #npm!

https://upyo.org/

This #GoToSocial account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform #Ghost (and troubleshoot issues) 😆

If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag #EleSelfHostsGhost so you can just mute it.

I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:
✅ I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS
✅ I imported all the old posts and media: https://news.elenarossini.com
✅ I installed #Apache to use #Varnish cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS
✅ I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/ Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)

So far so good.

👹 but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, #Mailgun immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account 😱

It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.

Now, why am I sharing all this?

In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:

https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6

And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.

I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.

Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.

Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation ❤️