Archived/2022/Solo

Pigeonpost

A self-hosted newsletter sender built before the hosted options got good. Retired deliberately, kept here because the delivery lessons still hold up.

Source

Pigeonpost took a markdown file and a CSV of subscribers and sent a newsletter, with bounce handling, unsubscribe links, and no web interface at all.

Why it is archived

The hosted services caught up and then went past it on the only axis that really matters for email: deliverability reputation. Running your own sender means owning that reputation, and for a list of a few hundred people that is a bad trade. I migrated my own list and stopped maintaining this.

What was worth learning

Deliverability is mostly operational, not technical. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the easy part; warm-up and complaint rates are the real work.
Bounce classification matters more than retry logic. A hard bounce retried is a reputation hit, not a second chance.
An unsubscribe link that works in one click, with no confirmation step, measurably reduces spam complaints.

Status

The repository is read-only. It still runs, but do not point it at a list you care about.