Demo Walkthrough | QQueue Docs

A 5–10 minute guided walkthrough of QQueue for a live demo or screen recording. It shows the full path from sign-up to a sent email, a campaign, and the operational tooling — and closes on the open-core story.

Before you start: have QQueue running locally (see the Quickstart) with the API, web app, and worker all up, and SMTP credentials ready for a mailbox you can send from. Have your own inbox open to show real delivery.

Timing in brackets is a guide for a ~8-minute run. Trim the campaign or analytics step to hit 5 minutes; linger on them to reach 10.

0. What is QQueue? [~45s]

"QQueue is an open-core, self-hosted email operations platform — one pipeline for transactional, campaigns, and manual sends, all on your own SMTP. The core — everything we'll see today — is open source under AGPL-3.0: SMTP connections, contacts and lists, templates, campaigns, transactional email, background queues, open/click tracking, and outbound webhooks. We'll go from zero to a sent email, then a campaign, then the operational view."

1. Register & log in [~45s]

Go to http://localhost:5173/register.
Sign up with an email, password, name, and organization name (e.g. "Acme").
Point out: registration created your user, your first organization (you're the OWNER), and signed you in. Land on the Dashboard.

"One sign-up bootstraps an account and an organization — the tenant boundary everything else hangs off of."

2. Create / switch organization [~30s]

Open the organization switcher (top-left).
Mention you can create additional organizations from Settings and switch between them; all data — SMTP, contacts, campaigns — is scoped per org.

3. Add an SMTP connection [~1m]

Go to SMTP Connections → New connection.
Enter host, port (587, secure off for STARTTLS), username, password, from address; mark it default.
Save and call out: QQueue verifies the credentials before saving and encrypts them at rest.

"QQueue is bring-your-own-SMTP — Mailcow, a transactional provider, anything that speaks SMTP. Credentials are encrypted with your key; we never see them."

4. Create a contact and a list [~1m]

Go to Contacts → New contact, add a recipient (use an inbox you control).
Go to Campaigns → Contact lists → New list, create a list and add the contact to it. This is the audience for a campaign later.

5. Create a template [~1m]

Go to Templates → New template.
Give it a subject and body using a variable, e.g. Welcome, {{firstName}} / <p>Hello {{firstName}}, welcome to QQueue.</p>.
Note that {{ variable }} placeholders are filled in at send time.

6. Send a transactional email [~1m]

Go to Send Email.
Choose your SMTP connection and recipient, either type a subject/body or pick the template, send.
Switch to your inbox and show it arriving.

"That's a single transactional send. The same thing is available over a signed HTTP API and an SDK with API keys — great for app notifications like receipts and password resets."

7. Create a campaign [~1m]

Go to Campaigns → New campaign.
Select the template and the contact list from steps 4–5.
Send now (or schedule for the near future to show queuing), and explain campaigns can also be recurring on a cron schedule.

"Campaigns fan out to a whole list. Sending is handed to a background worker, so the dashboard stays responsive and large sends are retried on failure."

8. Inspect queue, events, and analytics [~1m30s]

Queue Operations (owners/admins only): show the email-sending, campaign-processing, and webhook-delivery queues with queued / processing / failed counts, and the Retry action on a failed job.
Dashboard: show the recent activity feed of email jobs and events.
Campaign analytics: open the campaign's analytics — recipients, sent, delivered, opens/clicks (and their rates), and top clicked links.

"Every send emits events — queued, sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced — which power analytics and can be pushed to your systems via signed outbound webhooks. Open and click tracking is built in."

9. Open-core & QQueue Cloud boundary [~45s]

"Everything you just saw is the AGPL-3.0 open-core — self-host it, modify it, run it for your own users. If you run a modified version as a network service, AGPL asks you to share those changes.

QQueue Cloud is the separate, proprietary layer: managed hosting, billing and subscriptions, usage quotas, hosted onboarding, deliverability and abuse controls, reputation/warmup, and admin dashboards. It builds on the same core primitives but lives behind a commercial boundary — none of the core depends on it. So you get a genuinely useful open platform, with a managed option when you don't want to operate it yourself."

Point to Licensing and the Cloud boundary for the full split.

Wrap-up [~15s]

"From sign-up to a tracked, queued, analytics-backed email in a few minutes — all open source and self-hosted. Next steps are in the Quickstart and the Beta Launch Checklist."

Reset between demos: sign out, and (optionally) use a throwaway database so each run starts clean.

QQueue Demo Script