Self-hosted newsletters and email campaigns in 2026: revisit listmonk, Mautic and Keila before you send another campaign through Mailchimp

Email is still the one marketing channel that a company really owns. Social platforms change their feed rules, ad costs keep rising, but a list of people who asked to hear from you stays with you. The problem is the bill. Hosted tools like Mailchimp price by the number of contacts, so the list grows, the invoice grows, and one day the finance team asks why a newsletter costs more than the web server.

Self-hosted tools offer another path. You run the software, you keep the subscriber data in your own database, and you pay a sending service only for the emails you actually send. In 2026 three open source projects come up again and again: listmonk, a fast newsletter and mailing list manager written in Go; Mautic, a full marketing automation platform written in PHP; and Keila, a newer and simpler newsletter tool written in Elixir.

This post revisits all three calmly. We look at history, licences, stack, features, deliverability, operations, backups, security, the Indian consent angle, and when not to adopt each. We did not run a hands-on drill for this post; there was no test sending domain, no warmed IP and no real list, and a sending test without those says very little. Facts below come from the official GitHub repositories, release pages and licence files, read on 3 November 2026. Where we write from general knowledge, we say so.

A scenario to keep us honest

To keep the discussion practical, we use an invented company. This company is illustrative only; any resemblance to a real firm is accidental.

Mysuru Silk Route Crafts (invented) sells handloom sarees, stoles and home textiles online and through two stores in Karnataka. It has about 45 employees, a two person tech team led by Kavya, and a growing list of customers. Today:

• About 60,000 contacts sit in a hosted email tool, collected over years from the website, store billing counters and exhibitions.
• The marketing team sends a festive newsletter twice a month, and weekly during Navratri, Diwali and the wedding season.
• Order confirmations go through a separate transactional email service that the web developer set up.
• Nobody is fully sure which contacts gave consent and which were added from an old exhibition spreadsheet.
• The hosted tool’s bill went up again when the list crossed a pricing tier.

The owners want to cut cost, but they do not want emails landing in spam during Diwali, and they want to be on the right side of the new data protection rules.

Where these tools came from

listmonk

listmonk is developed by Kailash Nadh, and the repository on GitHub was created in June 2019. The README describes it as “a standalone, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager” that is “packed into a single binary” and uses PostgreSQL as its data store. From general knowledge, it came out of Zerodha’s own need to send large volumes of email, which is why speed and low resource use were design goals from day one. The repository had about 24,000 GitHub stars when we checked; stars show interest, not quality.

The latest stable release at the time of writing is v6.2.0, published on 26 June 2026. A v7.0.0-beta.1 was published on 20 October 2026. Treat the beta as a beta and do not put it in front of your real list.

Mautic

Mautic is the oldest of the three. The GitHub repository dates to August 2013, and the licence file says “Copyright 2014 by the contributors”. From general knowledge, Mautic was acquired by Acquia in 2019 and later moved to a more independent, community led governance model; check the project’s own governance pages for the current structure before you rely on any vendor relationship.

Mautic maintains several release lines at once. On 26 October 2026 the project published 7.2.2, 6.0.10 and 5.2.12 on the same day. That tells you two things: older lines still get fixes, and you need to know which line you run.

Keila

Keila is the youngest. The repository was created on 1 January 2021 by Pentacent. Its README calls it “an Open Source alternative to newsletter tools like Mailchimp or Sendinblue”. The project also runs a hosted service, Keila Cloud, which funds development. The latest releases are 0.40.0 (29 October 2026) and 0.40.1 (31 October 2026). The version number is still below 1.0, which is the project’s own signal that things can still change between releases.

Why not Sendportal as the third?

We considered Sendportal, a Laravel based tool under the MIT licence. It had a long gap between v3.0.1 (April 2024) and v4.0.0 (October 2026). It is alive again, but Keila has shipped more steadily, so we kept Keila. If your team is strong in Laravel, Sendportal is worth a look.

Licences, in plain words

• listmonk: AGPL 3.0. You can use, modify and self-host it freely. If you modify it and offer it to others over a network, you must share those changes under the same licence. For a company sending its own newsletter, this is rarely a concern.
• Mautic: GPL 3.0 or later, as stated in its LICENSE.txt. GitHub’s licence detector shows “NOASSERTION” because of the file’s layout, so read the file itself, not the badge.
• Keila: AGPL 3.0, as stated in its README and licence. Same practical meaning as listmonk.

None of the three has a closed “Enterprise edition” that hides core sending features, which is a real difference from many open core products. Keila does have a paid hosted cloud, and Mautic has a commercial ecosystem of hosting partners and agencies.

How each is built

listmonk stack

• Single Go binary, with the web admin and public pages bundled in.
• PostgreSQL is the only required dependency.
• Install is ./listmonk --install to set up the database, and --upgrade to upgrade. The README says upgrades “are idempotent”.
• Official Docker image and a sample Docker Compose file are available.

This is the lightest stack of the three. One small virtual machine plus a managed or self-run PostgreSQL is enough for many companies.

Mautic stack

• PHP application built on Symfony. The 7.x composer file requires PHP 8.2 or later.
• MySQL or MariaDB database (from general knowledge; check the install docs for supported versions).
• Cron jobs or a message queue for segment updates, campaign triggers and sending.
• A web server such as Nginx or Apache with PHP FPM.

Mautic is a full application server. It needs more care: PHP versions, cron schedules, cache clearing on upgrade and file permissions all matter.

Keila stack

• Elixir and Phoenix application.
• PostgreSQL database.
• Official Docker image pentacent/keila and a sample Docker Compose config in the repository.

Keila sits between the two. One container plus PostgreSQL, but a runtime (the Erlang VM) that few Indian ops teams know well. That is not a problem until you need to debug it.

Features that matter for a newsletter team

listmonk

• Lists, subscribers with custom JSON attributes, and segmentation with SQL expressions.
• Templates with a Go templating language, a visual and rich text editor, and Markdown.
• Multiple SMTP servers, with selection per campaign added in v6.2.0, plus messengers for other channels.
• Inline images (CID embedding) added in v6.2.0.
• Double opt-in, subscription forms, and a full API for transactional style messages.
• Bounce processing through a mailbox or through webhooks from services like Amazon SES (from general knowledge of the docs; confirm the providers for your version).

listmonk is very good at one job: send a lot of email to well managed lists, quickly. It is not a marketing automation suite.

Mautic

• Contacts, companies, segments, and lead scoring.
• Visual campaign builder with multi step journeys: send email, wait, check if opened, branch, add to segment.
• Landing pages, forms, focus items and website tracking.
• Email builder, A/B testing, and integrations with CRMs.
• Multiple transports, including SMTP and API based services.

If your marketing team wants “send a welcome series, then a reminder to people who did not click, then hand warm leads to sales”, Mautic is the only one of the three built for that.

Keila

• Simple campaign editor (rich text, Markdown and a block editor), sign-up forms and contact segments.
• Senders through SMTP or APIs. The README names AWS SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun and Postmark “in addition to SMTP”.
• For small lists, the README says you can “use your own email inbox to send out campaigns”.
• A clean interface that a non technical marketer can learn in an afternoon.

Keila is the easiest to hand over to a marketing team, but it has fewer advanced features than listmonk and far fewer than Mautic.

Deliverability: the part software cannot fix for you

This is the most important section. A self-hosted tool does not deliver email; your domain reputation and your sending service do. Getting this wrong means your Diwali campaign goes to spam, whatever tool you use.

Authenticate your domain

• SPF: a DNS record that lists which servers may send for your domain. Keep it under the 10 DNS lookup limit.
• DKIM: a signature on each email, with the public key published in DNS. Your sending service gives you the records.
• DMARC: a policy that tells receivers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails and where to send reports. Start with p=none and reporting, read the reports for a few weeks, then move to quarantine and later reject.
• Alignment: the domain in the visible From address should align with the SPF or DKIM domain. Use a subdomain like news.example.in for bulk mail so a bad campaign does not hurt your main domain.

From general knowledge, Gmail and Yahoo tightened bulk sender rules in 2024: authenticated mail, a DMARC record, one-click unsubscribe headers, and a low spam complaint rate. Check their current sender guidelines before your first big send.

Use a relay, do not send from your own server

Running your own outbound mail server on a fresh cloud IP is a poor idea for most teams. Many cloud providers block port 25 by default, new IPs have no reputation, and fixing blocklist problems is slow work. A relay such as Amazon SES, or another established provider, handles IP reputation, feedback loops and scale. All three tools can send through SMTP, and Keila lists SES directly. From general knowledge, SES has a sandbox mode for new accounts, so request production access well before a festive campaign.

Handle bounces and complaints

• Hard bounces (address does not exist) must stop all future sends to that address.
• Soft bounces (mailbox full, temporary failure) can be retried, but repeated soft bounces should also stop.
• Complaints (user clicked “spam”) must unsubscribe the person at once.

With SES, bounces and complaints come as notifications, usually through SNS to a webhook. Wire this up before the first campaign, not after. A list that keeps mailing dead addresses will lose reputation quickly.

Warm up and clean up

Do not move 60,000 contacts and send to all of them on day one. Start with your most engaged readers, a few thousand at a time, and grow over two to four weeks. Drop contacts who have not opened anything in a long time. A smaller, engaged list beats a big, cold one.

Operations

• listmonk: one binary, one database. Upgrades are replace the binary, run --upgrade, restart. The v6.2.0 release notes say it plainly: “take a backup of your Postgres database before upgrading.”
• Mautic: several moving parts. Plan cron jobs for segment rebuilds, campaign triggers and queue processing, and watch them. A stuck cron is the most common reason a Mautic campaign “did not go”. Major version upgrades (5 to 6 to 7) need reading of the upgrade notes and a staging run.
• Keila: container plus PostgreSQL. Upgrades are pull the new image and restart, with migrations run by the application. Since it is pre 1.0, read the release notes every time.

For all three, put the admin interface behind a VPN or at least an IP allow list, keep the public subscription and unsubscribe pages reachable, and monitor the sending queue.

Backups

• Back up the database daily, with point in time recovery if you use managed PostgreSQL or MySQL.
• Back up uploaded media and templates. In Mautic this includes the media and config folders.
• Keep the sending service settings (DNS records, SES configuration) documented, not just in someone’s head.
• Test a restore on a spare machine at least once a quarter. A backup that was never restored is only a hope.
• Remember that the subscriber database is personal data. Encrypt backups and limit who can read them.

Security

• listmonk v6.2.0 shipped “fixes for multiple campaign/list permission validation issues in multi-user environments”, according to its release notes. If several people log in with different roles, stay current.
• Mautic has a long history and a large PHP surface, and it publishes security advisories on GitHub. Its parallel releases on 26 October 2026 show older lines still receive fixes, but only for as long as the project supports them. Run a supported line.
• Keila is younger with a smaller surface, but less time in the wild also means fewer eyes have tested it.

General practice for all three:

• Strong passwords and two factor login where available, and no shared admin account.
• HTTPS everywhere, including tracking and unsubscribe links.
• Store SMTP and API keys as secrets, not in screenshots or chat messages.
• Restrict who can export the full list. A CSV export of 60,000 customers is the most valuable thing in the system.
• Keep the operating system, database and container images patched.

The Indian context: consent and the DPDP Act

This section is written from general knowledge, not legal advice, and we have not checked it clause by clause against the statute or the rules. Please confirm with your legal adviser.

India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and its rules make consent central for processing personal data like email addresses and names. In practical terms for a newsletter team:

• Consent should be clear and specific. A sign-up form that says what you will send and how often is better than a pre ticked box hidden in checkout.
• Keep proof of consent. Record when, where and how each person joined. Double opt-in gives you a clean record.
• Withdrawal must be easy. An unsubscribe link in every email, working in one click, honoured at once.
• Purpose matters. An email collected for an invoice is not automatically consent for marketing.
• Data location and processors. If you use Amazon SES or a cloud database, they are processing data for you. Know where the data sits and what your contract says.

Self-hosting helps here because you control the database and the export logs. It does not do the compliance work for you. For Mysuru Silk Route Crafts, the old exhibition spreadsheet is the real risk, not the software.

When not to adopt each

Do not choose listmonk if

• Your marketing team wants visual multi step journeys and lead scoring.
• Nobody on the team is comfortable with a terminal and PostgreSQL.

Do not choose Mautic if

• You only need a monthly newsletter. You will carry the weight of a full automation platform for nothing.
• You have no one to watch cron jobs and PHP upgrades.

Do not choose Keila if

• You need a long, stable track record before adopting a tool. It is still pre 1.0.
• You need deep automation or complex segmentation.

Do not self-host at all if

• Your list is small and the hosted plan costs less than a day of an engineer’s time each month.
• You have no one to own deliverability, DNS and bounces.

Back to Mysuru Silk Route Crafts

Here is a calm recommendation for our invented company.

1. Clean the list first. Separate contacts with clear consent from those without. Do not import the old exhibition spreadsheet into the new tool. Send a re-permission email from the current tool to doubtful contacts before moving.
2. Set up the sending base. Create news. subdomain, set up Amazon SES in the Mumbai region, add SPF, DKIM and DMARC with p=none, request production access, and wire bounce and complaint notifications.
3. Pilot listmonk. Their need is newsletters, not journeys, and Kavya’s team is small. listmonk v6.2.0 on one small VM with managed PostgreSQL is light to run. Stay off the v7 beta.
4. Warm up over the quiet months. Send to the most engaged 5,000 contacts first, then grow, so the domain is warmed well before Navratri.
5. Keep transactional mail separate. Order confirmations stay on their existing service for now.
6. Revisit Mautic later. If after six months marketing asks for abandoned cart series and lead scoring, run a separate Mautic trial on the 7.x line. Keila is a fair alternative if the marketing team finds listmonk’s interface too technical.

The goal is not to save money in the first month. The goal is to own the list, send reliably, and pay for what is sent.

Key takeaways

• listmonk is the light, fast choice for newsletters and lists. Mautic is the full marketing automation platform. Keila is the simplest, friendliest, and youngest.
• All three are open source (AGPL 3.0 for listmonk and Keila, GPL 3.0 for Mautic) with no closed edition hiding core features.
• Deliverability depends on SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a good relay like Amazon SES, bounce handling and warm-up, not on the tool.
• Back up the database, test restores, and treat the subscriber list as sensitive personal data.
• Under India’s DPDP Act, consent records and easy withdrawal matter more than which tool you pick.

Learn the basics of email authentication, unlearn the habit of buying more contacts to send more mail, re-learn list hygiene, practise with a pilot, and apply it before the next festive season.