The Post Office in a Single Binary: Running Your Own Mailing Lists with listmonk.

Most newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, so every new reader makes your bill bigger. That’s a tax on growth. Your subscribers’ personal data also ends up on someone else’s servers, which is a real concern now that India’s DPDP Act is in force.

This talk follows how a growing learning platform moved from a paid newsletter service to listmonk. listmonk is the open source mailing list manager built by Zerodha’s CTO, Kailash Nadh, to handle large email volumes. It ships as a single Go binary and its only dependency is PostgreSQL, so you bring your own SMTP provider.

How GoDisai sends newsletters, course updates and class reminders to 1,000+ learners with self hosted listmonk, at lower cost and with learner data kept in-house.

1. listmonk is just one Go binary and PostgreSQL, which makes it easy to run.

2. Send through a provider like Amazon SES, never straight from your server.

3. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC before your first campaign.

4. Import only opted-in users and turn on double opt-in.

5. Keep class emails separate from newsletters.

6. Handle bounces and complaints automatically.

7. Use SQL to target readers by course or progress.