my adventures in #selfhosting - day 115 (am I a spammer? edition) 
Hello Fedi friends,
I've been a little quiet this week because I have been dealing with an onslaught of unpleasant things over the past 6-7 days. Some are small things, some are really serious and I'm totally exhausted as a result. I'm just being completely transparent here because often life on the internet is based on a big lie and only highlight reels. My week has majorly sucked. But! In the words of Eckhart Tolle: "Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life." Today, right this minute, things are good.
Self-hosting and learning Linux are the things that typically keep me distracted and uplifted. I'm afraid my recent messages have turned into a litany of complaints. I didn't mean to - sorry about that!
Yes, attempts to self-host my Ghost blog have been mired with difficulties at literally every turn. Botched installations, the Mastodon Hug of Death once my blog was ready for its debut... and now? I cannot send a single blog post as a newsletter because Mailgun (the company providing the newsletter integration to Ghost) has flagged me as a spammer and has frozen my account. I have an open ticket and hope this will be resolved soon.
How did this happen? I have no clue. I tried to send a blog post as a newsletter to 210 people (yes ONLY 210 people), it didn't work, the Ghost interface suggested I try again... I did it twice, but I got a "failed to send a newsletter" message. Oddly in the Ghost interface there were stats that the newsletter was sent to 210 people with 0% open rate (it's my personal newsletter that had 65% open rate last time around). I'm subscribed to it for testing and didn't receive anything. Something that works seamlessly is sending test blog posts to my own address. But truly sending blog posts as newsletters fails every time.
Now Mailgun thinks I'm some kind of awful spammer keen on sending marketing messages to strangers. Ouf. They sent me a really long questionnaire about my intentions, my expected monthly volume, etc. Again, the ticket is open and I hope they will unfreeze my account soon. My sending volume is so tiny, it's a bit ridiculous to be dealing with this.
I had to re-activate my Ghost (Pro) account before its expiration on April 18th just to be on the safe side and have a plan B.
It's frustrating to be honest. But c'est la vie.
On the upside, I had reached out to Ghost's founder John O'Nolan to report the JSON code bug (in their documentation) and the maxAge cache issue on the default self-hosted plans... he sent me the nicest email thanking me for the feedback and said they will immediately fix the JSON instructions and implement a new maxAge setting (higher than zero) in the next Ghost release. I'm so excited and grateful for this! Newbie me - with your help!!! - managed to create some positive changes for Ghost. It's the best feeling.
The silver lining in all the self-hosted Ghost troubles is that I'm learning A TON. If every step had gone smoothly the first time around, I would not have learned so much about command lines, Nginx configurations, cache settings or DNS records.
I'm staying curious and very grateful for all the lessons.
And I want to thank you once again for your generosity, helping out as soon as I have a question / report a problem. I'm really touched by your kindness.
Wishing you all a lovely day and weekend.
