Listmonk Email Newsletter Digest

Generate a listmonk newsletter digest campaign from an RSS feed. I'm using it for my personal blog.

Usage

Best way to use this is docker and set it to run on a schedule. Check out the envrc-example for configuration details.

Some useful commands:

• LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG is useful for debugging
• docker compose exec listmonk-newsletter bash -l is useful for executing commands directly
• poetry install and then listmonk-newsletter to run it locally

Email Templates

You can provide your own email template to use. The one bundled, which is specifically styled for my blog, is based off of this template.

ListMonk Template Variables & Jinga2

What's neat is you can include ListMonk template variables (unsubscribe, tracking, etc) in the generated jinga2 template. This means you want your listmonk template to be a completely blank template and instead include everything in your email template added to this docker container.

You'll see this in the example template as:

{% raw %}{{ UnsubscribeURL }}{% endraw %}

Another interesting listmonk quirk is if you want link tracking, you need to add @TrackLink to the end of the URL. If you pass links to the campaign API without this, they will not be tracked.

TODO

• report test email bug to listmonk knadh/listmonk#1948
• click tracking when sending HTML content through the API doesn't seem to work
• add cli switches for env vars
• list selection should be configurable
• gpt-powered titles and summaries
• pull github releases and add to digest with gpt summary
• maybe add twitter content and add to update?