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Mailing list and logins down again — will be back

Emily Gorcenski

Nov 12, 2024 — 1 min read

Sigh, just when I figured everything is fixed, it breaks again.

I've disabled the newsletter and signups temporarily. The reason is once again issues with the mail service. Let me explain a little bit about why.

Ghost uses Mailgun as the default mailing service. It might be possible to change this but it would require a lot of work editing the source code—not worth it. But Ghost has two email sending modes: transaction mode and batch mode. Both of these work in slightly different ways. Batch mode, which is used for newsletters and the like, requires Mailgun and it executes via an HTTP call to an API using an API key. Transactional mode uses SMTP and account credentials. Theoretically I could use any service to send transactional emails—things like magic login links, signups, etc.—but it makes the most sense to use the same service for both, for the sake of consistency.

Registering with Mailgun requires setting up an account and setting some DNS settings to verify that you own the domain. But there's apparently also an undocumented verification step: Mailgun puts an extremely restrictive throttle on how many emails can be sent via API for new accounts, even ones that have verified their DNS and subscribed to a paid account. This requires opening a support ticket and providing some extra information to the service about the purpose of your site, where you get the email addresses from, etc.

Generally this is a good thing. Email delivery is a problem I do not ever endeavor to solve. Mailing services' entire business model relies on ensuring they have high deliverability percentages and low bounce rates. They have an interest in aggressively keeping spammers off their systems. But it also makes it hard for independent developers and writers to use their tools. Accordingly, the launch pains continue, but I hope to have this resolved by the end of the day.

My apologies for the inconvenience!

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