Great to hear they're a solution for this though -- will update my article to reflect them next to ImprovMX.
> I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that?
You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.
I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost.
Yup, "transactional" emails can be sent via a variety of methods, but "bulk" email can't.
I think the differentiation between transactional and bulk email is also bullshit (and a result of a broken underlying ecosystem) but that's a different story.
> I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost.
Just to be clear, transactions emails are fine, but bulk email is not.
I personally think Ghost just didn't want to unleash a wave of under-prepared people into the difficult problem of email deliverability.
Letting people use SMTP servers would immediately lead to people using their own postfix setups, GMail, transactional providers that offer SMTP, etc -- probably instantly leading to many people being banned for unintended use (there's that bullshit again), and people either being angry at Ghost or filing issues against Ghost about email not working.
What's unfortunate is that they didn't really shim it out so it's easy to replace Mailgun... Which is why I'm embarking on this quixotic quest at all. It may end up being helpful down the road though, API aggregation has been a common theme for my ideas lately.
To be fair, this was over 5 years ago. Maybe they have improved their ability to keep spammers out of the free tier service.