Postcard is now open source
23 comments
·July 3, 2025nanna
philip1209
Postcard originally used Postmark. But, Postmark deliverability has been decreasing. And, for the open-source version, I wanted to simplify dependencies. So, I moved it to SES. It works for small lists, but won't scale to massive ones.
I welcome PRs to add additional sending providers - it wouldn't be onerous.
pirsquare
postmark is a garbage now. This is coming from a previous postmark advocate and moved to SES.
SES is terrible in the past but now it is at least on-par if not better than postmark.
Only issue with SES is setup can be tedious.
keysdev
Would be nice to have just send using sendmail or what ever smtp server we chose. This is HN, and some of us have already done ip warming and to avoid any big players, as they all drop/block emails without telling their users and are not be trusted for reliable communication.
philip1209
Originally shared here in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549267
rmujica
It looks amazing! thanks for sharing. I also enjoyed your self-hosting post, I might give it a try.
toomuchtodo
Great work Philip.
austinjp
Psst... it's down for me. Cloudflare error page says SSL handshake failed.
philip1209
What's failing - the blog? Seems to be working fine for me and my uptime monitoring hasn't caught anything. Hopefully it's a blip!
My hosting setup is . . peculiar: https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/
npilk
Your original blog post links to www.postcard.page, which throws a Cloudflare SSL error, but the bare domain https://postcard.page appears to work fine.
philip1209
Ah, thanks. Just pushed a fix for this.
null
ho_lee_phuk
[flagged]
tomhow
This is what the guidelines mean by "generic tangent", "shallow dismissal" and being "curmudgeonly". The comment is not about the project or topic, it's just a general expression of discontent with things related to the project, without any consideration of whether that pattern applies to this project or whether this project may in fact be an exception to the pattern.
Please avoid comments like this on HN, and make an effort to observe the guidelines.
philip1209
Well, this service has been live and maintained for almost 3 years. And, if you self-host, then you can guarantee longevity.
Github, Airbnb, Shopify, Stripe, Basecamp, Instacart, Zendesk, Square, and others seem to be staying online, too.
I've written more about my Ruby opinions here: https://www.contraption.co/rails-versus-nextjs/
(Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130546 )
citizenpaul
I'll join your demise! I have a similar opinion and came up with my own answer.
Ruby is effectively Rails. Something about this has always bothered me because I don't like ruby and it gets SOO much praise from users. Which all almost universally happen to be using Rails. I've never used rails so I could not say why authoritatively. I did find someone recently on here that talked about it and mentioned that Rails is steeped in "magic". That it is unbeatable for a single person founder to create a project of any size. The problem is all that "magic" becomes a huge point of contention/confusion/friction when non rails zealots get involved, which is basically everyone.
Or to be more to the point Ruby and rails has a very specific use case and that use case has nothing to do with the application you are building rather the type and size of Team you are assembling.
To me its just a more obscure Python with a much smaller more enthusiastic user base.
darrenf
The only Ruby tool I (knowingly) use is homebrew, including distributing internal tools at my employer via private taps. I feel like migrating to nix would be a hard sell, so I'm hoping homebrew isn't on its way out just yet!
theappsecguy
I mean, do you have a rationale or examples? I find that JS ecosystem is where projects go to die, whether npm libraries or projects.
Rails and Ruby on the other hand offers one of the best ecosystems and a lot of stability
null
This looks great but delivery via Amazon SES is a problem. I'm an academic and I tried to set up a work newsletter like this with Listmonk recently, but SES rejected my request to relieve me of sandbox mode for unspecified 'security reasons'. Everything was set up properly, it was under a domain under my personal name, I gave links to my profile page on my university website, ample explanation about what I would do with it (one email ever few months), that I would be the only sender, but they rejected it. So in the end I've opted for a hosted solution... anyone else had similar issues?