I installed ListMonk on on our Coolify instance. ListMonk is an open-source newsletter and mailing list manager, so the email portion of ActionNetwork.
I added an API Key from Resend. This means that while ListMonk will be used to design the emails and track subscribers, the emails will actually be going through Resend’s ip-addresses.
Listmonk has its own templating documentation here and I’m using these opensource templates from github to give WCU emails a very basic design.
My goal is to make it easy for anyone to add the text of the email and send it off, without having to worry about the html because we wanted our emails to look too nice.
Why we are sending emails through Resend instead of directly from our server:
We need to do this because sending/receiving email from your own server is not a great idea. Email providers (like gmail, yahoo, etc.) use IP reputation to determine how likely your email is spam or not. IP reputation (our server has its own IP address) is based on things like how often people open and click on email links, mark them as spam, bounce rates, and your overall sending volume.
Email providers will send email from ip addresses with no/low reputation straight into spam folders. This reputation is hard to build if we are just doing email blasts from our own server, especially if we are just doing newsletter blasts.
With services like Resend (and ActionNetwork before), you use a shared IP address that already has established reputation. Services like these maintain high reputation by ensuring their users send legitimate emails. ActionNetwork always made sure any bulk email imports were legit and Resend is a paid service (for more than 100 emails a day), which filters out most spammers. This means we get to benefit from their reputation and our emails are much more likely to reach inboxes instead of spam folders.
Domains also have their own compliance, but we are mostly able to deal with that through DNS records and Cloudflare. Here’s the compliance status from Google’s Postmaster Tools:
