Technical articles and updates from the Broadcast team about self-hosted email marketing. https://sendbroadcast.net/ en Topics told Broadcast which emails each subscriber wants, but you could only change them through custom data, and segments could not filter by them. Broadcast 2.48 puts topics on the subscriber profile and adds a Topic segment rule, and a topic the subscriber turned off stays off until they turn it back on. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/manage-subscriber-topics-and-segment-by-topic https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/manage-subscriber-topics-and-segment-by-topic 15 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu Each new background worker in Broadcast is a full copy of the application, and a 2 GB server started to swap during large sends. Broadcast 2.44 adds Low memory mode: the whole job server runs in one process, chosen on the Jobs page, with no SSH needed. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/run-email-marketing-on-a-2-gb-server https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/run-email-marketing-on-a-2-gb-server 11 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu A large newsletter could use up an email server's hourly limit and make password resets wait. Broadcast now sends transactional email first, keeps room in the hourly limit for it, and never goes above the limit you set. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/login-codes-never-wait-behind-a-newsletter https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/login-codes-never-wait-behind-a-newsletter 10 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu A founder says half his churn is now customers who rebuild his product with AI. So I priced out rebuilding mine with Claude, using all 3,032 commits in its history. Here is the token bill, the Claude Max bill, and when you should build it yourself. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-it-costs-to-vibe-code-broadcast https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-it-costs-to-vibe-code-broadcast 07 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu When a list gets one kind of email nobody asked for, the only way out used to be unsubscribing from everything. Broadcast 2.41 adds subscriber topics: people choose the emails they want, unsubscribe from one topic without leaving, and every choice is recorded for your consent trail. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/let-subscribers-choose-which-emails-they-get https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/let-subscribers-choose-which-emails-they-get 07 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu Broadcast already spoke your subscribers' language, but the dashboard was English only. Broadcast 2.39 adds Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish. Each person picks their own on My Profile. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/email-marketing-dashboard-in-your-language https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/email-marketing-dashboard-in-your-language 02 Oct 2026 Simon Chiu A broadcast that dies halfway leaves you guessing who got it. Broadcast 2.38 stops cleanly, tells you why, and lets you resume without mailing anyone twice. Webhooks now wait out an outage, and your suppression list says where every address came from. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/resume-a-failed-email-broadcast https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/resume-a-failed-email-broadcast 29 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu Salesforce's own template editors are fine for a quick one-to-one email and painful for anything designed. A step-by-step guide to building the template in a free drag-and-drop builder, pasting the HTML into Lightning Email Templates or Account Engagement (Pardot), and swapping in the right merge fields. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/salesforce-email-template-builder https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/salesforce-email-template-builder 26 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu Purging a channel's subscribers used to leave your integrations in the dark. Broadcast now sends one webhook for the whole purge, with counts, and another if the purge stops before it finishes. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/webhooks-for-purging-a-subscriber-list https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/webhooks-for-purging-a-subscriber-list 25 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu Das EU-US Data Privacy Framework gilt, steht aber unter Druck. Was ein Wegfall für Unternehmen mit US-Newsletter-Tools bedeuten würde, und was Sie mit Ihrem DSB heute schon vorbereiten können. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/data-privacy-framework-faellt https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/data-privacy-framework-faellt 24 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu Connecting an AI agent to Broadcast used to mean a CLI or raw API calls, and adding a teammate meant clicking through the web interface. Broadcast 2.35 has an MCP server built into the app, a Users API for admin tokens, and a rate limit you can set on each token. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/mcp-server-and-users-api-for-self-hosted-email https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/mcp-server-and-users-api-for-self-hosted-email 16 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu Until now, a Broadcast email was either rich text or HTML you wrote yourself, and neither was a comfortable way to lay out a designed newsletter. Broadcast now has a drag-and-drop builder, and a brand kit that every design starts from. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/drag-and-drop-email-builder-with-a-brand-kit https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/drag-and-drop-email-builder-with-a-brand-kit 14 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu A password alone is a weak lock on a tool that can email your whole list. Broadcast now supports a second sign-in step with an authenticator app, lets an administrator require it for everyone, and can hand sign-in over to Cloudflare Access if your dashboard already sits behind it. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/two-factor-authentication-for-self-hosted-email https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/two-factor-authentication-for-self-hosted-email 10 Sep 2026 Simon Chiu If you run several brands or lists in Broadcast, you have probably opened two tabs and had them quietly fight over which channel you were in. The channel now lives in the page's address, so each tab stays where you put it. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/working-in-multiple-channels-at-once https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/working-in-multiple-channels-at-once 17 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu DigitalOcean blocks outbound SMTP on ports 25, 465, and 587 on droplets, sometimes after months of working fine. A step-by-step guide to confirming the block from your own server, getting sending again on port 2525, and appealing the block. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/digitalocean-port-25-465-587-blocked https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/digitalocean-port-25-465-587-blocked 15 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu A customer wrote in saying they could not build a segment that kept two lead sources and excluded two others. The feature they needed had shipped six months earlier. This release is mostly about why they could not find it, and the bugs I found while looking. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/segment-rules-and-or-conditions https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/segment-rules-and-or-conditions 15 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu A customer's server kept going down at weekends, and their upgrades hung instead of finishing. The cause was a single database session left open on someone's desk. This release makes a blocked upgrade fail in seconds instead of waiting forever, refuses to interrupt work that a restart cannot resume, and lets a channel keep its marketing mail off the stream that carries its receipts. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/the-upgrade-that-never-finished https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/the-upgrade-that-never-finished 09 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu Broadcast has let one channel send from several From addresses for a while. The setup wizard only ever checked one of them with your email provider, so the second and third addresses could look fine in Broadcast and be rejected at send time. In 2.27 every identity gets checked, individually, and told you which one is the problem. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/verify-every-sender-address-not-just-the-first-one https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/verify-every-sender-address-not-just-the-first-one 07 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu Shipping a release is the easy half. Telling your users about it is the half that slips. Broadcast can now watch your changelog or GitHub releases and draft the announcement email for you, staged for review before anything sends. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/announce-your-releases-automatically https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/announce-your-releases-automatically 04 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu A customer with dozens of channels told us our permissions page was too complicated to look at, and granting access meant clicking through channels one at a time. He was right on both counts. 2.24 rebuilds the whole thing around roles you can read and a bulk apply that stamps a permission set onto every selected channel in one step. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/channel-permissions-roles-and-bulk-apply https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/channel-permissions-roles-and-bulk-apply 03 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu The honest weakness of self-hosting is that nobody is watching your box at 3am. Broadcast 2.25 adds opt-in health monitoring that emails you when your server stops checking in, a one-command checkup that collects the evidence, and a repair command for the boring drift that breaks installs. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/knowing-when-your-self-hosted-server-goes-down https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/knowing-when-your-self-hosted-server-goes-down 03 Aug 2026 Simon Chiu If you run several channels in Broadcast, an address that hard-bounced in one could still be emailed from the others. That is a reputation problem, and it was ours to fix. 2.23 adds a one-action copy from a channel's suppression list to the global one, and a full API for both lists. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/blocking-a-bounced-address-everywhere https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/blocking-a-bounced-address-everywhere 31 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu A customer's segment was matching far fewer people than it should. The cause was a date column imported as 24/01/2026, which no segment rule can compare. Broadcast 2.21 adds a Maintenance section that finds values like that and repairs them, and a format picker so they stop arriving in the first place. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/repair-imported-dates-that-break-segments https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/repair-imported-dates-that-break-segments 29 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu An error page asked people to send us a report and never said what was in it. Worse, the button had been quietly broken, so the reports that were sent arrived empty. Broadcast 2.20.1 fixes the button and shows you the exact payload before you send it. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-an-error-report-sends https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-an-error-report-sends 27 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Self-hosted software has a habit of going quiet. It runs, it works, and six versions later you find out you missed a fix that would have saved you an afternoon. Broadcast 2.20 adds an update notice, a switch to turn it off, and a way to reopen any past release's What's New tour. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/knowing-when-your-self-hosted-app-needs-updating https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/knowing-when-your-self-hosted-app-needs-updating 26 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Your data should never be stuck inside the tool that happens to hold it. Broadcast 2.19 adds CSV export to the subscribers list, the broadcasts list, and a broadcast's recipient activity, and every export contains exactly the rows the screen was showing, filters and all. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/csv-export-subscribers-broadcasts-activity https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/csv-export-subscribers-broadcasts-activity 26 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu A customer sent a list of nine things that annoyed them about Broadcast. Version 2.18 is most of that list: domain search, a sortable recipient table for every send, cloning templates and segments, template tags, and engagement in a subscriber's activity. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/shipping-a-customer-feedback-release https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/shipping-a-customer-feedback-release 26 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Self-hosting means the backup story is yours to get right. Broadcast 2.17 uploads every backup to S3-compatible object storage (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, MinIO), tests the connection before you trust it, and prunes old copies on a schedule you set. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/offsite-backups-s3-object-storage https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/offsite-backups-s3-object-storage 24 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu A successful API response is not the same as the outcome you intended. Broadcast 2.16 adds a warnings array to every response where the two diverge, an Idempotency-Key header for transactional sends, and a clean path for migrating confirmed subscribers off another platform. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/api-warnings-and-idempotent-sends https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/api-warnings-and-idempotent-sends 23 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Broadcast shipped an in-app AI assistant in v2.12. You bring your own key and pick the model. Subscriber data never leaves your server. There's no AI tier. Here's how it works. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ask-ai-self-hosted-email-assistant https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ask-ai-self-hosted-email-assistant 10 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Everyone checks SPF, DKIM, and DMARC once, at setup, and never again. Then a DNS migration breaks a record weeks later and deliverability slides with no warning. Broadcast now watches those records continuously, out of the box. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/monitor-spf-dkim-dmarc-dns-health https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/monitor-spf-dkim-dmarc-dns-health 09 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Email platforms were built for a human clicking a dashboard. In Broadcast 2.0 we added a first-class surface for AI agents: discovery endpoints, setup links, a bash CLI, and an MCP server. Because it's self-hosted with a real API, an agent can run it end to end. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/agent-native-email-marketing https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/agent-native-email-marketing 08 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu The hardest part of a newsletter is not sending it. It's writing issue 37 when you're busy shipping. Autopilot drafts each issue from sources you point it at (your GitHub repo, RSS feeds, web pages) and hands it to you for review before anything goes out. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/autopilot-ai-newsletters https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/autopilot-ai-newsletters 07 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Self-hosted software has a communication problem: you upgrade, and the features you paid for sit there unfound. Broadcast 2.15 adds a short What's New tour that runs after an upgrade: a screenshot and a link per feature, once per user, dismissible. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/whats-new-tour-after-upgrade https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/whats-new-tour-after-upgrade 06 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu When you self-host your email platform, a crash mid-broadcast is your problem to get right. Here is how we made Broadcast's send pipeline idempotent, self-retrying, and resumable, built on Postgres constraints and Active Job. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/bulletproof-email-sending https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/bulletproof-email-sending 06 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Double opt-in is table stakes for GDPR-conscious list building, but most platforms hand you one rigid flow you cannot touch. Broadcast exposes the whole thing, from the API to the confirmation page, down to redirecting subscribers to your own domain. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/double-opt-in-email-marketing https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/double-opt-in-email-marketing 05 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu A subscriber is more than an email and a name. Here's how Broadcast lets you attach structured data to every subscriber, collect it at signup, import it cleanly, and segment on all of it, across the list-building features we shipped this spring. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/list-building-and-segmentation https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/list-building-and-segmentation 04 Jul 2026 Simon Chiu Ask any chatbot about SPF and it recites the same generic advice. Broadcast 2.14 lets Ask AI answer deliverability questions using your domains' real SPF, DKIM and DMARC check data, grounded in what your DNS actually says today. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ai-that-reads-your-own-dns https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ai-that-reads-your-own-dns 15 Jun 2026 Simon Chiu Every piece of startup advice says recurring revenue is the holy grail. We sell Broadcast for a one-time fee anyway. Here's the reasoning: the incentives it fixes, the trade-offs it forces, and what it means for the people who buy it. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/why-one-time-license https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/why-one-time-license 06 Jun 2026 Simon Chiu Every platform's export has different column names, and most importers make that your problem. Broadcast 2.11 previews your file, guesses what each column is, and lets you map anything it got wrong, including tags and custom fields, before a single row is written. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/csv-import-column-mapping https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/csv-import-column-mapping 09 May 2026 Simon Chiu Three regulatory shoes are about to drop in a 30-day window. Here's what European email marketers actually need to know about the CLOUD Act, the Data Privacy Framework, and NIS2, and what self-hosting does and doesn't fix. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/eu-data-sovereignty-email-marketing-2026 https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/eu-data-sovereignty-email-marketing-2026 09 May 2026 Simon Chiu The cheapest moment to learn something about a subscriber is the moment they're already typing. Broadcast 2.10 adds a Custom Field block to the opt-in form editor, so a signup form can collect free-text answers straight into a subscriber's custom data. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ask-a-question-at-signup https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/ask-a-question-at-signup 03 May 2026 Simon Chiu Someone clicks your confirmation link and lands on a page built by your email software. Broadcast 2.8 lets you write that page yourself (separate heading and body for each of six outcomes) or skip it entirely and redirect to a page on your own site. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/confirmation-pages-you-control https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/confirmation-pages-you-control 28 Apr 2026 Simon Chiu "Subscribed after March 1st" is true for about a week. Broadcast 2.6 adds relative dates to segment rules ("in the last 30 days") so a segment recalculates itself every day instead of quietly aging into nonsense. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/segments-that-update-themselves https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/segments-that-update-themselves 04 Apr 2026 Simon Chiu Wiring a sending provider into self-hosted email software used to mean API keys, DNS records, webhook URLs and a lot of tab-switching. Broadcast 2.1 added guided setup wizards for Postmark, AWS SES, SendGrid and Mailgun that do the discovery and the webhook plumbing for you. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/email-provider-setup-wizards https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/email-provider-setup-wizards 22 Mar 2026 Simon Chiu Broadcast 2.0 made two bets that looked odd for email software in early 2026: that AI should draft your newsletter but never send it, and that an AI agent should be a first-class user of the platform. Here's what shipped, and what it was for. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-broadcast-2-0-actually-changed https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/what-broadcast-2-0-actually-changed 16 Mar 2026 Simon Chiu How we built a system to verify emails sent through AWS SES, Postmark, SendGrid, and Mailgun actually arrive, using Cloudflare Workers, KV storage, and Rails credentials. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/e2e-email-provider-testing https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/e2e-email-provider-testing 10 Jan 2026 Simon Chiu How we built Broadcast to run on customer servers with a single command, using Docker, SolidQueue, Thruster, and file-based triggers for container-to-host communication. https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/self-hosting-rails https://sendbroadcast.net/blog/self-hosting-rails 25 Nov 2025 Simon Chiu