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Introduction

What QQueue is and where to begin.

QQueue is an open-core, self-hosted email operations platform for developers and small teams. One unified delivery pipeline serves three kinds of email — campaigns, transactional (API/SDK/webhooks), and manual sends from the dashboard — all through your own SMTP server, on infrastructure you control. The core documented here is open source under AGPL-3.0: SMTP connections, contacts and lists, templates, campaigns, transactional sends, background queues, open/click tracking, and outbound webhooks.

QQueue is not an SMTP server. It does not replace Mailcow, SES, Postmark, Resend, or Brevo. It sits on top of any standard SMTP server — connecting over SMTP, not providers' native HTTP APIs — and adds campaigns, transactional email, queues, tracking, webhooks, and operational visibility. One pipeline for every send.

Status: QQueue is a feature-complete, self-hosted beta for early technical users, undergoing launch preparation. Its full verification suite — lint, typecheck, build, a comprehensive automated test suite, a Docker-backed end-to-end smoke test, license audit, and cloud-boundary check — passes in CI. It's beta software: pin a known-good commit for production and review the security and operational notes first.

What QQueue does

  • One pipeline, three send types — transactional (API/SDK), campaigns (template → list, scheduled or recurring), and manual sends composed in Email Studio. All share the same queue, tracking, and suppressions.
  • Transactional email — send via API key or SDK, inline or from templates, immediately or scheduled, with stable responses, error codes, and an Idempotency-Key so retries never double-send.
  • Campaigns — send a template to a contact list or dynamic segment, now / one-shot scheduled / recurring (cron + timezone), with A/B subject tests, pause, resume, and analytics.
  • SMTP integrations — bring your own SMTP server (Mailcow, SES, Postmark, Resend, Brevo, or any standard server), connected over SMTP (not their native APIs). Credentials are encrypted at rest and verified on save.
  • Contacts, lists & templates — manage your audience and reusable templates with {{variable}} substitution.
  • Tracking & webhooks — built-in open/click tracking and signed outbound webhooks for email events, plus a normalized inbound ESP event endpoint.
  • Queues & workers — BullMQ-backed sending and campaign fan-out, with a queue operations dashboard for failed/queued/retry state.

Open core

  • QQueue Core — AGPL-3.0, self-hostable, open source.
  • QQueue Cloud — a planned, separate proprietary layer for managed hosting, billing, quotas, deliverability tooling, and hosted operations. It is not yet available; see the Cloud boundary.

Who it's for

Developers wiring transactional email into an app, Mailcow operators, self-hosters, SaaS founders, indie hackers, agencies, and any team that wants to run its own email platform with proper campaign and transactional tooling.

Start here

  1. Quickstart — clone to first sent email, locally.
  2. Send your first email
  3. Send your first campaign
  4. Transactional API and the SDK — wire sends into your app.
  5. SMTP provider guide and Mailcow setup
  6. Beta launch checklist before going to production.