// the find
vitorfs/colossus
Self-hosted email marketing solution
Colossus is a self-hosted Django app for running your own email newsletter — mailing list management, campaign scheduling, open/click tracking, and subscriber forms. It's a solo developer's side project that powers the author's own blog newsletter, which explains both its coherence and its ceiling.
Works with any SMTP provider (Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill, or raw SMTP) — no lock-in. Double opt-in is on by default, which is the right call and something many newer tools skip. The post-send link rewriting feature (change a URL after the email is sent) is genuinely useful and not obvious to implement. Test coverage is solid for a solo project — factories, model tests, view tests across every app.
Frozen in 2018-era deps: Django 2.1, Python 3.6, Celery 4.2, Bootstrap 4 — none of these are current and upgrading is your problem. Last meaningful commit was 2024 and the repo was effectively dormant before that. No multi-tenancy, so if you want separate workspaces per user it doesn't exist. RabbitMQ is listed as a hard dependency for scheduling, which is a significant ops burden for what is otherwise a simple CRUD app.