Hey Mailtrain user,
There's some great news for everybody who wants to have more control over their lists.
Firstly, there's now an option to turn off user tracking. If you check the "Disable clicked/opened tracking" checkbox when creating a campaign, then no tracking links or images are injected into the message. If you set this setting once the campaign is already sent then tracking links are not counted – all redirections etc. keep working but the counter is not incremented and no data is stored about who clicked on what.
Secondly, if you install Mailtrain using the bundled installation script then ZoneMTA is installed next to Mailtrain and it's automatically integrated so once the installation process is finished you can already send mail from your Mailtrain install with no extra configuration!
Obviously you would have to tweak a thing or two to increase your deliverability rate, like setting up proper SPF, DKIM and PTR DNS records, and your server must have port 25 open too but it's still a lot easier than setting up and configuring a third party service to handle the message delivery. If you do not want to be in charge of the deliveries then you can still switch to use a third party SMTP service but if you're up to the task, then you have the choice of handling everything yourself.
Anyway, if you really care about privacy of your subscribers then you can now disable user tracking, send messages using GPG encryption and deliver messages directly from your own server with no third party in between. Truly awesome, or what? The less good news is that in order to subscribe using a built-in subscription form the subscribers must have JavaScript enabled in their browsers so no NoScript anymore. This is needed to fight spammers, who sign up random people to random forms found on the internets. Once Mailtrain is popular enough that it becomes a first class target for the spammers a captcha system needs to be introduced, until then we can get through using a simple background check with javaScript.
A few words about ZoneMTA. it's a project I've been working on for my employer and fortunately it was decided to open source it so anyone can use it. The application is installed to /opt/zone-mta directory and the configuration files reside in /opt/zone-mta/configuration. You can tweak the installation if you want to, for example you could add additional IP addresses for sending the messages, or change domain specific configuration (you can define sending limits for different domains) etc. See other possible configuration options in the ZoneMTA README.
Best regards,
Andris
https://mailtrain.org
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