jdrouet/jolimail repository overview

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!