Postalion – Newsletters and Email Subscribers

Postalion is a newsletter plugin that runs entirely on your own site. It collects subscribers, sends your newsletters in the background and keeps a record of every email. Your list stays in your WordPress database and the mail goes out through wp_mail(), so it uses whatever SMTP plugin or mail service you already have.

There are no limits on subscribers or on how often you send, no account to create, and the plugin makes no requests to outside servers.

Write

• Newsletter composer with five email templates: Classic, Letter, Bulletin, Announcement and Card
• Content blocks made for email: headline, button, two columns, image and text, note, divider, spacer, social links
• Personalisation: subscriber name and email, site name and address
• Preview for desktop and phone, and a test email to yourself
• The templates show your site logo, or the site name when there is no logo

Send

• Background sending in batches: the first batch goes out at once, the rest through WP-Cron
• Batch size and pause between batches are yours to set (default: 10 emails every 5 seconds)
• Send now, or schedule a date and time
• Live progress, with stop and resume
• An interrupted send continues where it stopped; nobody gets the same email twice

Mail server (optional)

Out of the box the emails go through the mail function of WordPress, so whatever your host or your mail plugin set up keeps working. If nothing is set up, enter an SMTP server under Settings: your own, or a sending service such as Brevo, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or SendGrid. A button tries the settings before you save them, the password is stored encrypted, and a switch can route all the mail of the site through the same server. No second plugin needed.

Grow

• Sign-up form as a block or a shortcode, with double opt-in
• An optional sign-up popup: appears once per visit, stays away once closed
• Sign-up checkboxes in forms you already have: registration, comments, the WooCommerce checkout, Contact Form 7
• Lists: group subscribers, let each form fill a list, send to the lists you pick
• CSV import and export, into and out of lists
• Import from MailPoet: people, lists and statuses come over in one go
• The users of your site are subscribers too, and can opt out from their profile
• Search, filters and bulk actions

Automatic emails (optional)

• A welcome email to people who sign up, once they are confirmed
• New post notification: a published post goes out as a newsletter, to everyone or to chosen lists

Statistics (optional, off by default)

• Opens and clicks per newsletter, with the links that were clicked
• Counted on your own site; nothing is sent anywhere else

Keep track

• Email log: every email with its recipient, date and result, and a preview of the email as that person received it
• Activity log: sign-ups, confirmations, unsubscribes, imports and sends
• System log for errors and warnings
• Log entries are deleted automatically after a period you choose (90 days by default)

Respect

• Unsubscribe link in every email, plus one-click unsubscribe for mail clients that support it (List-Unsubscribe-Post)
• No tracking pixels and no rewritten links unless you turn statistics on
• Supports the WordPress tools for exporting and erasing personal data
• No telemetry and no external requests

Shortcodes

• [postalion_form] – sign-up form. Attributes: title, description, button_text, show_name="false", list="slug", class. In the block editor, use the “Postalion sign-up form” block instead.
• [postalion_unsubscribe] – unsubscribe form.
• [postalion_subscriber_count] – number of people on your list.

For developers

Pro

A Pro add-on is being built for larger lists and more advanced work: a drag-and-drop builder, email sequences, segments by behaviour, A/B testing and WooCommerce automations. The free plugin is complete on its own and has no limits to remove. More at postalion.fantasythemes.net.