A free, open-source, self-hosted cold-email outreach platform — a lightweight alternative to Instantly, Smartlead, and lemlist.
Send personalized emails at scale using your own SMTP mailboxes. No paid SaaS, no data leaving your machine, no per-seat pricing.
- Multiple connections — add any number of SMTP mailboxes (Gmail, Outlook, custom); test, pause, and track daily limits per mailbox
- Inbox / IMAP — poll received mail across all mailboxes; automatic reply and warmup detection
- Leads — upload CSVs with a visual column-mapping wizard; manage lists and individual contacts
- Sequences — multi-step email sequences with configurable delays between steps; write with
{spintax|options}and{{variable|fallback}}placeholders; live preview - Campaigns — pair a sequence with a lead list; choose which mailboxes to rotate across; set a send schedule
- Scheduling — send-window (time of day), days of week, daily cap, and randomized delay jitter between sends
- Email rotation — spread sends evenly across mailboxes; respect per-account daily limits
- Dashboard — activity overview and send analytics
- Node.js >= 20
- pnpm >= 10 (
npm install -g pnpm)
# 1. Install dependencies
pnpm install
# 2. Set up environment
cp .env.example .env.local
# Edit .env.local — generate APP_ENCRYPTION_KEY with:
# openssl rand -hex 32
# 3. Initialize database
pnpm db:generate
pnpm db:migrate
# 4. Start the app
pnpm dev
# → http://localhost:3000Production note: the background scheduler and inbox poller run inside the Node.js process. Use
pnpm build && pnpm start(not a serverless platform) so they keep ticking between requests.
- Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19
- Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui (dark theme, blue primary)
- SQLite + Drizzle ORM (zero config, single file —
data.db) - Nodemailer (SMTP send) + imapflow (IMAP receive)
- TypeScript 5 strict
- pnpm workspaces + Turborepo monorepo
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
APP_ENCRYPTION_KEY |
✅ | 64 hex chars (32 bytes). Encrypt SMTP passwords at rest. Generate: openssl rand -hex 32 |
DATABASE_URL |
— | SQLite path. Defaults to file:./data.db |
- SMTP and IMAP passwords are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM using
APP_ENCRYPTION_KEY. APP_ENCRYPTION_KEYanddata.dbare git-ignored and never leave your machine.- If you ever share the project folder, delete or regenerate these files first.
See CLAUDE.md for the full developer handbook: architecture, conventions, commands, data model, and scheduler design.
MIT — see LICENSE.
Lightreach helps you send cold outreach. If you also want to automate the discovery side of link building — finding relevant backlink opportunities (guest posts, resource pages, roundups) and drafting outreach for your approval — check out Mentiohunt, another project of mine.