vk — An Open Source Newsletter Tool

vk (email-sender) is a self-hosted newsletter and email-marketing tool operated by vmanne.com. It lets you manage subscriber lists, design newsletters, send campaigns, and track opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.

With vk you can easily send out newsletter campaigns and create sign-up forms. For sending, vk supports AWS SES and standard SMTP (including on-prem relays).

Features

• Contact lists, segments, and groups (CSV import supported)
• Visual, Markdown, and HTML email editors with reusable templates
• Campaign sending and scheduling
• Embeddable sign-up forms with double opt-in
• Per-recipient activity tracking: sent, opened, clicked, bounced, complaint, unsubscribed
• Flexible delivery via AWS SES or SMTP / on-prem relay
• All data stored in your own PostgreSQL database

Self-Hosting

vk is distributed as a Docker image and requires a PostgreSQL database.

A sample Docker Compose configuration is provided in ops/docker-compose.yml.

Quick start

# Build the image from source
docker build -f ops/Dockerfile -t email-vk:latest .

# Start the app and database (see the compose file for configuration)
docker compose up -d

The application listens on port 4000 inside the container. Configure it with environment variables (database URL, SMTP settings, secret key, etc.).

Key environment variables

Variable	Purpose
DB_URL	PostgreSQL connection string
SECRET_KEY_BASE	Strong secret, at least 64 characters
KEILA_USER / KEILA_PASSWORD	Root admin user created on first start
URL_HOST / URL_SCHEMA / URL_PORT	Public URL settings
MAILER_SMTP_HOST / MAILER_SMTP_USER / MAILER_SMTP_PASSWORD	SMTP / SES delivery
MAILER_SMTP_FROM_EMAIL	From address
USER_CONTENT_DIR	Path for persisted user uploads

Note: some internal configuration variables retain their original names for compatibility with the upstream codebase.

Version

Current version: 0.0.1

Attribution & License

vk is based on Keila, an open source newsletter tool, and is distributed under the same license.

vk is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

vk is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

For more details about the AGPL, please read the full license here.

Because vk is derived from AGPL-3.0 licensed software, if you make vk available to other users over a network, you must also offer them the complete corresponding source code of your modified version.