Mailcheap

Overview

Mailcheap is a self-hosted newsletter app built on Amazon SES. It provides an editor, list management, signup forms, unsubscribe handling, bounce and complaint handling, stats, and a public archive in one Next.js app. One admin, no teams, and your list stays in your database. It costs about $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent.

Key Features

• Editor with a live email preview, slash commands, image uploads, boxes, Markdown, and raw HTML.
• Checks before every send: subject, preview text, unsubscribe link, size under Gmail's 100 KB clip, postal address, and verified domain.
• Test emails, scheduling, and sending in batches through QStash at a configured rate, with step sending to engaged readers first.
• Several newsletters in one install, each with its own from address, reply-to, postal address, signup form, and signup API.
• SES events, a shared suppression list, automatic send pausing when bounces pass 2% or complaints pass 0.08%, one-click unsubscribe, and optional list cleanup.
• Public archive for each newsletter with issue pages, author page, share images, sitemap, optional custom domain, overview stats, and campaign reports by mailbox provider.

Use Cases

• Self-hosting a newsletter while using your own Amazon SES account and keeping subscriber data in your own MongoDB database.
• Running multiple newsletters from one install with separate send identities, signup forms, and archives.
• Sending to the most engaged readers first and growing each send over time while monitoring deliverability.
• Publishing issues on a public archive and measuring delivery, open, click, bounce, complaint, and provider-level campaign performance.

Getting Started

• Plan for about an hour, most of it waiting for DNS and for AWS to approve production access.
• Create a MongoDB Atlas cluster, add a database user with read and write access, allow 0.0.0.0/0, and copy the connection string with a database name as MONGODB_URI.
• Deploy to Vercel or run on any Node.js host with npm ci && npm run build && npm start behind HTTPS; set MONGODB_URI, ADMIN_EMAIL, ADMIN_PASSWORD with 12+ characters, and SESSION_SECRET with 32+ characters.
• Configure Amazon SES by verifying a sending domain, setting a custom MAIL FROM domain, adding DMARC, requesting production access, creating a configuration set, creating an SNS topic, sending SES events to it, creating an IAM user, and adding SES_REGION, SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
• Set up QStash, add QSTASH_TOKEN, QSTASH_CURRENT_SIGNING_KEY, and QSTASH_NEXT_SIGNING_KEY, create a newsletter, then set SENDING_ENABLED=true and redeploy to turn sending on.

Deployment & Requirements

• MongoDB for contacts, campaigns, and stats; the free tier works.
• Amazon SES for sending; about $0.10 per 1,000 emails.
• Upstash QStash for background sending and scheduling; free tier to start, then pay per message, and one message sends 50 emails.
• Vercel or any Node.js host for hosting; free tier works.
• Optional Upstash Redis for rate limits shared by every server instance; free tier.

Before You Adopt

• License: MIT. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• The project is a one-time release with no support and no planned updates.
• New Amazon SES accounts start in a sandbox limited to 200 emails per day and verified recipients only until production access is granted.
• Without Redis, rate limits are counted per server instance and are not shared or persistent on serverless hosts, so Redis is recommended before placing a signup form on a busy site.
• Background sending through QStash requires the app to be reachable on the internet.
• Image uploads in the editor require optional Vercel Blob storage.