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)
External services
This plugin contacts no server of the manufacturer and no third-party service. Mail goes out over the mail path of your own server, and no subscriber data leaves your installation.
One setting fetches content from elsewhere: with “Embed images in the mail” switched on, the plugin downloads every image used in a newsletter from the address it is hosted at (usually your own site) and attaches it to the mail. Nothing is sent along except the request for the image. The setting is off by default.
Screenshots
Writing a newsletter: visual editor, HTML and text version, target groups and scheduling.
The modules, switched on and off in one place. Here post notification: new posts go out by themselves, one by one or as a weekly digest.
The templates, shown with your own logo, accent colour and site name.
The newsletter list with the sending status of each issue.
Subscribers with groups and status, with CSV import and export.
The subscription form on your site, placed as a block, shortcode or widget.
"Data collected": what the plugin stores, where and for how long, for your privacy policy.