Can I use Listmonk to manage a small mailing list?

[chetbaker]

Hello folks, aI have a dummy question I can't find an answer elsewhere.

I need to be able to set up a basic infrastructure for creating a couple of mailing lists (w less than 20 people each) for those people to be able to send and receive emails instead of doing it with all of them CC'ed.

I was thinking on Mailman, but aside of not being implemented in Cloudron it seems Listmonk can, in theory, also do the trick.

So, 2 questions

1. Is any of you using Listmonk in some similar way than described above?
2. I'm currently managing emails with an external email provider (not Cloudron). Do I need Mailgun or similar to do something like what I'm described (a list-serve and not a newsletter stack)?

[luckow]

The easiest, fastest and most convenient way is to use Cloudron's built-in mailing list directly. Email -> Domain -> `Add Mailing List

Enter your 20 addresses there and share the list address with your people.

But this only works if you (as administrator) do the monkey work and add or delete the addresses.
There is no subscribe or unsubscribe for the Cloudron Mailing List feature.

If you need this kind of feature, you need to add a tool like listmonk as an app to your Cloudron instance.
In listmonk go to Settings -> SMTP and add your external email provider

So easy

Btw: I use listmonk for several newsletters with thousands of subscribers. For the SMTP part I have set up my own relay host with https://github.com/postalserver/postal (instead of using Mailgun or similar services).

[chetbaker]

Thanks so much for your detailed answer.

In the past, I tried to use Cloudron infrastructure for this as you described, but there are some servers that were rejecting those emails because of

Failure Reason: Error: Too many failures (Tried all MXs)

So, I gave up using it, and that's the reason I'm currently using our own email provider's alias service (not ideal) and I'm asking whether Listmonk is the right tool or maybe I should just install Mailman in a VPS but I fear of being banned for spam, etc.

[luckow]

Listmonk works for your use case. But it feels like "Mit Kanonen auf Spatzen schießen." (aka crack a nut with a sledgehammer).

But this is not a solution to the Failure Reason: Error: Too many failures (Tried all MXs) if you use the same SMTP server you used before. Have you checked the status of your mail domain in the Cloudron dashboard? Does it look like this?

[chetbaker]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they were like that back then. Now I moved away from Cloudron and I'm just using an email provider.

[robi]

@luckow said in Can I use Listmonk to manage a small mailing list?:

For the SMTP part I have set up my own relay host

With listmonk can't a Cloudron instance also serve as the relay host, provided the IP/domain has been warmed up and good deliverability?

[luckow]

@robi It's perfectly fine to use your Cloudron instance for that. Maybe it's easier to warm up your IP. For me, it was another challenge to learn postal It all depends on your use case.