Let’s get straight to the point, MailPress is the best free Email Marketing and Email List Manager plugin for WordPress. It lets you collect emails and send newsletters when you want, helping you keep close contact with your readers. Why would you use Mailpress instead of other established online services such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor? First reason, you get to send emails without incurring any cost, i.e. the Mailpress solution is FREE. Second reason, you get a fully fledged mailing list system within your WordPress admin panel, thus it is CONVENIENT.
Here are some notes about this plugin:
To add a subscription form widget
This can either be done via widgets, via shortcode or by manually inserting code into your theme.
Subscription Form Via Widgets
- Go to Appearance >Widgets
- Drag the MailPress widget onto the widget enabled area.
Subscription Form Via Shortcode
This method is ideal when you want to insert the subscription form in a post or page from the Edit screen. Including in a page or a post can be done by using the following shortcode:
[php][mailpress][/php]
Subscription Form Via Manual Insertion
Including the following code (in your sidebar or in your WordPress theme), will insert the MailPress subscription form.
[php]if (class_exists(‘MailPress’)) MailPress::form(); [/php]
MailPress Add-Ons
I like to enable also the following MailPress add-ons:
- Batch send
- Bounce handling
- Bulk import
- Import
- Mailinglist
- Newsletter
- Newsletter_categories
- Post
- Tracking
- Upload_media
- View_logs
- Wp_cron
Configuring Mailing Lists
One of the first mailing lists I always create is called ‘Website Subscribes’ and contains all the users who subscribe to the newsletter from the subscribe (using the Subscribe form we mentioned earlier). I create it by editing the default ‘Uncategorized’ mailing list, which serves no real purpose and is thus best renamed.
More details and instructions can be found on the MailPress website. Have you used this plugin? What do you think of it?
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9 Responses
Hello, this is Derek Shenk from
How does Mailpress compare to Wysija?
When our clients resolve addiction, weight, depression and other issues so quickly through our program, they want to share their experience with their friends.
Is there any way to add a “forward to a friend” link in a newsletter? I have been trying to do this with Wysija, but cannot find a solution. Can Mailpress provide this feature? Many email programs like MailChimp offer this feature and anyone trying to build their subscribers would obviously want this feature.
Thanks.
Definitely go for Wysija (now called MailPoet). It’s way more actively developed nowadays.
Amazon Web Services offers Simple Email Service that now has an SMTP gateway – so you could sign up for an AWS account and set u pso that you can send through SES, regardless of which host you are on.
I run my webserver on AWS and run WordPRess exclusively for all my clients, and personal projects. And am looking into using SES to do all outbound email.
Piet I agree. Our shared hosting has a restriction of 500 emails an hour to stop the server being hijacked for spam so using WP to send out mass emails is not a good idea as it slows the server down for everyone else.
Another good reason to use Mailchimp or another such service is that their IP addresses are known for sending out mass emails. We have had instances or an account being hacked via a dodgy script or such like, which leads to our IP address being blacklisted on certain services.
In an ideal world we would al have a dedicated server for our website but this is not cost effective for most people.
Mailchimp of course takes this worry away, but actually smtp.com is really easy to set up and solves this problem completely. Not many people seem to be aware of this service though.
This seems to be a great plugin if you are using Gmail (or Google Apps) to send your emails from. What I mean is that if you use the email address of your own domain, I am not entirely sure that your host is going to be happy with you.
Suppose you have a mailing list of 500 addresses and you are going to use your own host to broadcast your email newsletter. Not only can a lot of emails end up in junkmail folders of the recipients, there is also a high potential that your host is going to take measures against you for sending “spam”.
In that aspect using MailChimp (or any such alternative) seems to be a lot better, but again I want to emphasize that if you use Gmail/Google Apps all of this is no problem of course.
Ah, never saw that one before. That would be an idea indeed, although I’d still prefer to do it via MailChimp, but it’s all about personal preference 🙂
At Wysija, we’ve taken the time to get some deals with 3 good Email Service Providers (ESP) for our newsletter plugin users to increase their deliverability.
Regardless of your choice, MailChimp, Awebers or Wysija, MailPress with ESP, you’ll still have to “authenticate” yourself. This means changing your DNS records to say to your subscribers’ inbox: “Hey, MailChimp is an authorized sender for my domain”.
As for MailChimp, it’s a pretty awesome service. But it will never be integrated fully with WordPress. For most clients, that’s yet another tool to learn, yet another login, etc.
Try Wysija, you’ll see how drag & drop your site’s content is actually fun.
Which other ones have you tried?
Check us out. We’re quite new, but we’re off to a good start: