// the find
phpList/phplist3
Fully functional Open Source email marketing manager for creating, sending, integrating, and analysing email campaigns and newsletters.
phpList 3 is a self-hosted email marketing platform for sending, tracking, and managing newsletters and campaigns, written in PHP with a web admin UI and a CLI. It's for people who want to run their own list-sending infrastructure instead of paying for Mailchimp/SendGrid-style SaaS, and who are fine with an old-school PHP codebase in exchange for features aimed specifically at deliverability.
Domain-based throttling, a rule-based bounce processing engine, and built-in Amazon SES support show this was built by people who actually deal with deliverability problems, not just template design. It ships a Docker image and docker-entrypoint scripts, so you can run it in containers even though the README still documents a manual tarball-copy install. It has a real plugin system and separate installable admin themes (Trevelin, Dressprow) hosted as their own repos, so the extension points aren't just theoretical. There's actual test infrastructure — a CI badge, Behat config, and Selenium bootstrap scripts — which is more than a lot of projects this old bother to keep up.
Two full copies of PHPMailer (PHPMailer and PHPMailer6) plus a vendored PEAR HTTP_Request2 are checked directly into the tree — dependency upgrades mean diffing vendored folders instead of bumping a Composer version. The admin app is a flat pile of hundreds of procedural top-level .php files (admin.php, bounce.php, cron.php, etc.) with no namespacing or PSR-4 autoloading, so the learning curve for a new contributor is steep compared to any modern PHP framework app. The README's upgrade process is still 'download a tarball, manually copy config files, run a database backup by hand' — that's inconsistent with also shipping a Docker image, and suggests the docs haven't caught up with how people actually deploy this now. At 872 stars and 290 forks for something that claims 25 billion messages sent across 95 countries, most of the real usage and support clearly lives around the paid hosted product, not this repo, so it's hard to gauge how actively the open-source edition itself is maintained versus the SaaS.