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Notes from running self-hosted email at scale.

Tutorials with copy-paste configs, IP warmup schedules with day-by-day numbers, deliverability playbooks for the post-2024 Gmail / Yahoo era, and analysis of how the industry is shifting under self-hosted operators. Every post traces its claims back to RFCs, vendor docs, or specific paths in the AcelleMail codebase — nothing paraphrased, nothing hand-waved.

Tags: tutorial comparison deliverability industry

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Newest first.

comparison tutorial

How I migrated 50K subscribers off Mailchimp in 3 days

A real account of moving a 50,000-subscriber B2B newsletter from Mailchimp Standard to AcelleMail + Amazon SES. Where the time went, where it broke, and what the new monthly bill looks like.

May 22, 2026 10 min read
tutorial comparison

The true cost of self-hosted email at 100K subscribers

A full accounting of what 100K-subscriber self-hosted email actually costs in 2026 — VPS sizing, SES at scale, engineering time, and the line items that don't appear in marketing calculators.

May 22, 2026 9 min read
industry

When NOT to self-host your email marketing

A self-hosting vendor saying "the cheaper path isn't always the right path" — five honest situations where Mailchimp / Brevo / Klaviyo is the better call, and how to recognise yourself in them.

May 22, 2026 7 min read
industry deliverability

What Gmail and Yahoo's February 2024 bulk-sender rules changed

Two years on from the Feb 2024 bulk-sender requirements, the dust has settled: DMARC is now table stakes, one-click unsubscribe is enforced, and the 0.3% complaint-rate ceiling is real. What it means...

May 8, 2026 10 min read
deliverability

A 6-week IP warmup schedule for self-hosted senders

A concrete day-by-day IP warmup plan: linear vs exponential ramp, why week 2 is the bottleneck, how AcelleMail's WarmupStrategy model executes it, and what to watch in SES reputation feedback during t...

May 8, 2026 9 min read
tutorial

How to send 50,000 emails per month for under $5 with AcelleMail + Amazon SES

A pricing breakdown that survives scrutiny: the AcelleMail one-time license, the AWS SES per-1,000-message cost, the EC2 instance footprint. Where the $5/month figure comes from and where it can drift...

May 8, 2026 11 min read
tutorial deliverability

The 7 DNS records every self-hosted email sender needs

A copy-paste DNS reference: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX, BIMI, MTA-STS, and a tracking-domain CNAME. Concrete syntax for Cloudflare and Route53, the order to publish, and what each record actually does.

May 8, 2026 12 min read

Why this blog

Source-grounded, no fluff.

The pillar guides at /guide/email-deliverability and /guide/email-marketing-cost-savings are the long, stable references. The blog is where shorter, dated material lives — concrete tutorials, post-mortems, regulatory updates, release notes. Each post is dated and revisable: when an RFC update or a vendor pricing change lands, the affected post gets a fresh updated_date rather than a new post.

Subscribe to the RSS feed if that is your reading style. Otherwise check back — cadence is two posts per month, scaling to four after the first quarter.

Ready to run this in production?

AcelleMail is a one-time-license self-hosted platform. The tutorials on this blog assume an AcelleMail install — here is one.

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