Keila

Keila is a newsletter tool built as an alternative to Mailchimp and similar hosted services. It covers the whole loop: growing a contact list through sign-up forms, designing a campaign, sending it, and reading what happened afterward, without the list itself living on a platform you do not control.

Campaigns can be written in a visual block editor, in Markdown with or without a WYSIWYG layer, in MJML for fully custom responsive layouts, or in plain text. Base templates absorb the differences between Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, mobile, and desktop. For a small newsletter you can send through your own inbox over SMTP; larger projects point Keila at AWS SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun, or Postmark instead.

The features around sending are where a list actually gets managed.

• Form builder: sign-up forms with additional checkboxes, text fields, and dropdowns.
• Bot protection: hCaptcha or Friendly Captcha on forms, plus double opt-in confirmation of new sign-ups.
• Segments: subsets of a list built from contact data such as language or tags, through a visual editor or a segment language.
• Liquid templating: personalization from custom contact data held as a JSON object, using Shopify's Liquid.
• Analytics: open and click tracking that can be switched off entirely with one setting.
• API: contacts, campaigns, forms, segments, and templates all addressable, with CSV import and export.

Self-hosting needs the official Docker image and a PostgreSQL database and nothing else, though a reverse proxy has to forward WebSockets correctly. Keila is written in Elixir, and a sample Docker Compose file ships in the repository.