maennchen1 Newsletter Germany turns WordPress into a newsletter system. Subscribers live in tables of your own WordPress database, and mail is sent over the mail path of your own server. No subscriber address and no sending statistic is handed to a third party, because there is no third party involved.
The plugin was written for German and European operators, where data protection law makes the location of subscriber data a practical question rather than a preference.
New posts go out by themselves
Switch on post notification, and every post you publish reaches your subscribers by mail: each one on its own, or collected into one digest, daily or weekly. You choose the groups, the categories and the template. A delay of a few minutes leaves time to fix a typo, and each notification is an ordinary newsletter that you can still change before it goes out.
What it does
- A subscription form for your site, as a block, a shortcode or a widget
- Double opt-in, with a confirmation mail the operator writes
- An unsubscribe link in every mail: one click, no login (or confirmed by mail, if you prefer)
- Subscriber groups, so one newsletter can go to a chosen audience
- Newsletters in HTML and plain text, sent as multipart mail
- Scheduled sending over WP-Cron, in batches sized for shared hosting
- An archive page and a browser view for readers whose mail client mangles HTML
- Placeholders such as %abo_vorname% anywhere in subject and body
- Layout templates, and your own templates in an upload folder that updates never touch
Optional modules
Each of these is switched on or off under Newsletter > Configuration > Modules:
- A sending log of who received which newsletter
- Placeholder rules, for example for salutations
- Post notification, immediately or collected as a daily or weekly summary
- Spam protection for the subscription and unsubscription form, without a puzzle, without a third party and without storing an IP address
Requirements
PHP 8.1 or newer with the extensions dom and simplexml. A working mail path on the server — either PHP mail, an SMTP account or wp_mail.
More
- Manual, in English and German
- Paid edition with further modules, sold separately (website in German)
The
full changelog is in the manual. The file changelog.txt inside the plugin folder lists every version of this edition.
2.1.1
- Added: consent log — unsubscribing and deselected groups, groups per consent
- Added: sending — text version with unsubscribe link and browser view, taken from the content if none is entered
- Fixed: data export — active subscribers were listed as inactive, unconfirmed ones as active
- Fixed: newsletters — explanation below the sending status was missing
- Fixed: newsletters — "Copy content into the text version" cut off the text after links
- Fixed: sending — via PHPMailer the HTML without tags went out instead of the text version
2.1.0
- Security: unsubscribing — the unsubscribe link in the newsletter did not check its token
- Added: maintenance — merge duplicate subscribers
- Added: sending — mails rejected for the time being are retried later, encryption for SMTP selectable, one-click unsubscribe in the mail program, interval of the internal cron selectable, next run right away when a run's time is up, "Start sending" continues until done, sending status with the recipients at the start
- Added: subscriber mails — texts revised and editable in the backend, in the layout of the newsletters, test mail, notice to the administrator with address and groups
- Added: subscribers — filter by group and status as drop-downs, combinable, column "Created on"
- Added: templates — legally required details in the footer from a setting
- Changed: data collection — reasons of mails not sent listed
- Changed: menu — "Sender and subject" is now "Automatic mails"
- Changed: sending — sending time reduced by up to 60 % (depending on the MTA)
- Changed: subscribers — the list remembers page, filter and sort order
- Fixed: interface — dates and times in German format in the English interface
- Fixed: newsletters — a copy lost template, subject, sender and format
- Fixed: sending — errors of the WordPress mailer counted as sent, special characters from subscriber fields in HTML, duplicate addresses received the newsletter more than once, two simultaneous sending runs sent mails twice, "Start sending" broke off on large lists and held up sending
- Fixed: sending log — mails not sent were shown as sent
- Fixed: subscriber mails — the unsubscribe confirmation claimed deleted data when the subscriber was only set inactive, greeting without a name
- Fixed: subscribers — salutation shown as a number, CSV import with empty fields, CSV export without header, duplicate addresses when adding and importing
- Fixed: subscription — mail subjects stayed in English after the site language was changed
- Fixed: templates — "Zeitung" showed the month in English on non-English sites