Cal Evans has continued his series covering Mautic, the PHP based self-hosted marketing automation platform. This is step one in the process with his previous post in the series introducing Mautic and why he's trying it out.

This is the second post in a series titled “My Journey into Mautic”. If you are starting here, you might get an incomplete picture, you may want to check out the previous articles.

There are two things that really confuse me about Mautic, properly configuring an Email Service Provider (ESP), and segmenting & tagging. We’ll tackle the latter one in a later post, but the former is an important topic. It is also one that I do not fully understand. What is presented here is what I have learned through trial and error. it my be partially or wholly incorrect. If you find something that I’ve gotten wrong, please, by all means, correct me in the comments.

He starts by defining what an ESP service is and what it's useful for. While he had done the self-hosted email server in the past, he recommends paying for a service these days, deciding for his needs on Mailgun. He covers the difference between transactional and broadcast emails followed by the setup process he followed to get Mailgun up and working with his Mautic install.

In Matt Stauffer's latest post he shows you how to integrate Sendy for sending emails into your Laravel application. This is the first part of a new series.

Last week I decided to finally bite the bullet and take the advice I've been giving so many others: I committed to creating an email newsletter to recap some of my favorite posts and also to give me a space to share some thoughts I don't have space for anywhere else. So, time to get my newsletter-sending-setup up and running.

He starts by explaining his decision to use Sendy, choosing a self-hosted application over a service. There's a one-time fee to purchase it, but it's relatively inexpensive for the features that come bundled. He then gets into the steps to implement it and integrate it into your application:

• Buy Sendy and prep your code
• Install Sendy on Forge (with a few sub-points)
• Set up your domain
• [Read] Sendy's Getting Started Guide
• Set up cron jobs
• [Create] Templates

He also sneaks in a signup form example with a double use - it also signs you up for his newsletter.