jdrouet/jolimail

Jolimail is an open source alternative to all the transactionnal email solutions.

Why did we build jolimail?

Jolimail comes from the frustration of using several email providers. We used to work with products like sendgrid, mailgun, mailchimp, sendinblue, etc.

But they have many disadvantages :

• Most of them are not really transactional oriented, and users complain that their login emails take a long time to arrive.
• You cannot host it nor use it on premise
• It's American, with the patriot act, they are able to access your users data.
• They usually don't have templating tools for our non tech coworkers that ask us to change a wording every 2 days. And when they do, the editors are like html online editors, so it ends up being our job to make the template anyway.

How to use it?

Jolimail is a simple application that allows you to create your email templates directly in the browser and have a preview.

You can start it in different ways but we recommend using Docker if you are on a amd64, i386 or arm64 architecture. By doing the following, you'll be able to have a running jolimail server that will provide your email template, a catapulte instance and a fake smtp server.

git clone https://github.com/jdrouet/jolimail.git
cd jolimail
docker-compose -f docker-compose.example.yml up

Then you should be able to reach jolimail here and the smtp server here.

If you want to use it in a production environment, you can will just need a postgres instance where the templates will be stored.

You can also deploy it on Heroku with the following button

Should you use it?

If, like us, you didn't find any good way of doing transactional emails, then Yes!

Why you should use it :

• You work in a startup

  • You don't have shit loads of money to spend on the mailing tools, so use something opensource, send your emails from your own SMTP (or from Amazon SES, it's cheap)
  • You don't have time to change the email template everyday, so let your Product Owner do it
  • You wanna be able to add this little feature, just do a pull request...

• You work in a big company

  • You cannot use those external services because you're not allowed to put your user's data on an external service.
  • You cannot access external services because it's blocked by the proxy
  • You want to customise the way you authenticate to your SMTP
  • You want something user friendly enough that your manager can write the emails

Thank you!