Postal: The Sendgrid Alternative We Should All Try

It's becoming increasingly common for companies to use their own email servers and implement email marketing. Personally, I think one of the best tools for this is SendGrid , but unfortunately, it's proprietary. An alternative to SendGrid that I've been testing for the past few days is Postal , an open-source email server with very interesting features that can be easily installed on your web server.

What is Postal?

Postal is an open-source tool, developed in Ruby, PHP and Node by the aTech Media team , that allows us to have a mail server with extensive features on any platform or web server.

This tool is an excellent alternative to SendGrid , Mailgun , or even the less popular Postmark . It was originally created to cover the basic needs of the aTech team but was later released for use by all users.

The tool has a very nice interface and has been tested for more than 6 months, it also has a simple api that will allow us to send and receive emails more automatically.

A variety of screenshots of the application will surely give a more detailed explanation of the characteristics of this excellent open source mail server.

How to install Postal?

Before installing Postal we need to have Ruby, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Node.js and git installed, then we must follow the following steps:

Create the corresponding database and prepare it for the proper functioning of Postal
```
mysql -u root -p
```
We must create the postal database, you must replace the local ip of your server and also the XXX with the password you want.
```
CREATE DATABASE `postal`CHARSET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
GRANT ALL ON `postal`.* TO `postal`@`127.0.0.1` IDENTIFIED BY "XXX";
```
Allow a specific user to have access to all prefixed databases postal-.
```
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `Postcard-%` . * to `postal`@`%`  IDENTIFIED BY "XXX";
```

Create a RabbitMQ virtual host with the following commands:

sudo rabbitmqctl add_vhost /postal
sudo rabbitmqctl add_user postal XXX
sudo rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p /postal postal ".*" ".*" ".*"

Prepare your distro to run zip

sudo useradd -r -m -d /opt/postal -s /bin/bash postal

Install two dependencies that are required and few projects need:
```
sudo gem install bundler
sudo gem install procodile
```
Clone the source code in the appropriate directory with the following command:
```
sudo -u postal git clone https://github.com/atech/postal /opt/postal/app
```
We can create a symbolic link to access postal from any directory, with the following command
```
sudo ln -s /opt/postal/app/bin/postal /usr/bin/postal
```
Install the Ruby dependencies that Postal needs to run.
```
postal bundle /opt/postal/app/vendor/bundle
```
Run the initial setup of the tool with the following command:
```
postal initialize-config
```
Initialize the postal database and register your installation so that it has https:
```
postal initialize
```
Registering our lets encrypt key
```
postal register-lets-encrypt [email protected]
```
Run your postal server and start enjoying:
```
postal start
```

Conclusions about Postal

Personally, I think Postal is an ideal tool to replace cloud services that offer the same features, because it gives us more control and a more pleasant management of our information. Obviously Postal has its disadvantages and advantages over other proprietary or free solutions, so an analysis of our situation is convenient to determine if it is suitable for our use.

Likewise, Postal's learning line is quite short, so in controlled environments, quite acceptable tests could be given on the use and operation of the tool.

It is important to highlight the importance of having a lightweight, secure and open source email platform, but much more important, it is to take the adequate time to choose between the application that best suits your needs. I personally consider this new tool the alternative to Sendgrid that best suits my needs, so I recommend it and from today it will be queued for the production environment.