[HN Gopher] Postcard is now open source
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       Postcard is now open source
        
       Author : philip1209
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2025-07-03 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.contraption.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.contraption.co)
        
       | philip1209 wrote:
       | Originally shared here in 2022:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549267
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | Great work Philip.
        
       | austinjp wrote:
       | Psst... it's down for me. Cloudflare error page says SSL
       | handshake failed.
        
         | philip1209 wrote:
         | What's failing - the blog? Seems to be working fine for me and
         | my uptime monitoring hasn't caught anything. Hopefully it's a
         | blip!
         | 
         | My hosting setup is . . peculiar:
         | https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/
        
           | npilk wrote:
           | Your original blog post links to www.postcard.page, which
           | throws a Cloudflare SSL error, but the bare domain
           | https://postcard.page appears to work fine.
        
             | philip1209 wrote:
             | Ah, thanks. Just pushed a fix for this.
        
       | ho_lee_phuk wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | philip1209 wrote:
         | Well, this service has been live and maintained for almost 3
         | years. And, if you self-host, then you can guarantee longevity.
         | 
         | Github, Airbnb, Shopify, Stripe, Basecamp, Instacart, Zendesk,
         | Square, and others seem to be staying online, too.
         | 
         | I've written more about my Ruby opinions here:
         | https://www.contraption.co/rails-versus-nextjs/
         | 
         | (Discussed on HN here:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130546 )
        
         | theappsecguy wrote:
         | I mean, do you have a rationale or examples? I find that JS
         | ecosystem is where projects go to die, whether npm libraries or
         | projects.
         | 
         | Rails and Ruby on the other hand offers one of the best
         | ecosystems and a lot of stability
        
         | citizenpaul wrote:
         | I'll join your demise! I have a similar opinion and came up
         | with my own answer.
         | 
         | Ruby is effectively Rails. Something about this has always
         | bothered me because I don't like ruby and it gets SOO much
         | praise from users. Which all almost universally happen to be
         | using Rails. I've never used rails so I could not say why
         | authoritatively. I did find someone recently on here that
         | talked about it and mentioned that Rails is steeped in "magic".
         | That it is unbeatable for a single person founder to create a
         | project of any size. The problem is all that "magic" becomes a
         | huge point of contention/confusion/friction when non rails
         | zealots get involved, which is basically everyone.
         | 
         | Or to be more to the point Ruby and rails has a very specific
         | use case and that use case has nothing to do with the
         | application you are building rather the type and size of Team
         | you are assembling.
         | 
         | To me its just a more obscure Python with a much smaller more
         | enthusiastic user base.
        
         | darrenf wrote:
         | The only Ruby tool I (knowingly) use is homebrew, including
         | distributing internal tools at my employer via private taps. I
         | feel like migrating to nix would be a hard sell, so I'm hoping
         | homebrew isn't on its way out just yet!
        
         | tomhow wrote:
         | This is what the guidelines mean by "generic tangent", "shallow
         | dismissal" and being "curmudgeonly". The comment is not about
         | the project or topic, it's just a general expression of
         | discontent with things related to the project, without any
         | consideration of whether that pattern applies to this project
         | or whether this project may in fact be an exception to the
         | pattern.
         | 
         | Please avoid comments like this on HN, and make an effort to
         | observe the guidelines.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
       | rmujica wrote:
       | It looks amazing! thanks for sharing. I also enjoyed your self-
       | hosting post, I might give it a try.
        
       | nanna wrote:
       | This looks great but delivery via Amazon SES is a problem. I'm an
       | academic and I tried to set up a work newsletter like this with
       | Listmonk recently, but SES rejected my request to relieve me of
       | sandbox mode for unspecified 'security reasons'. Everything was
       | set up properly, it was under a domain under my personal name, I
       | gave links to my profile page on my university website, ample
       | explanation about what I would do with it (one email ever few
       | months), that I would be the only sender, but they rejected it.
       | So in the end I've opted for a hosted solution... anyone else had
       | similar issues?
        
         | philip1209 wrote:
         | Postcard originally used Postmark. But, Postmark deliverability
         | has been decreasing. And, for the open-source version, I wanted
         | to simplify dependencies. So, I moved it to SES. It works for
         | small lists, but won't scale to massive ones.
         | 
         | I welcome PRs to add additional sending providers - it wouldn't
         | be onerous.
        
           | keysdev wrote:
           | Would be nice to have just send using sendmail or what ever
           | smtp server we chose. This is HN, and some of us have already
           | done ip warming and to avoid any big players, as they all
           | drop/block emails without telling their users and are not be
           | trusted for reliable communication.
        
           | pirsquare wrote:
           | postmark is a garbage now. This is coming from a previous
           | postmark advocate and moved to SES.
           | 
           | SES is terrible in the past but now it is at least on-par if
           | not better than postmark.
           | 
           | Only issue with SES is setup can be tedious.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-03 23:00 UTC)