Tech-No-PhobiaSharing IT adventures, Tips, Guides and Product Reviews

In this post, I will review a WordPress plugin called Mailpress.
Mailpress is a complete newsletter solution for WordPress. It is very powerful and flexible and most importantly it is completely free!

Hebrew translation package for Mailpress attached to this publication.
Download link located at the end of this post.

One of the most powerful tools any blogger can have to keep in touch with his subscribers is a newsletter. There are many online services for writing, customizing and sending out newsletters (Getresponse and Mailchimp to name two), and Israeli readers of
Tech-No-Phobia may use this service and take advantages of  Hebrew localized interface. However, there is one thing in common for all the above mentioned services, they all cost money, and they will become more and more expensive as your mailing list grows larger.
Mailpress differ from those because it is free, and because you can install it on your own server and use it without limitations.

Mailpress allows you to:

• Send out beautiful HTML or Plain Text messages to subscribers based on themes and templates of your choosing.
• Set up periodic newsletters ( per post, daily, weekly, monthly) and the scope of them (entire blog or specific category).
• Send out notifications for a specific admin event (new comment, new user registration).
• Set up marketing campaigns – auto-responders allows you to send out pre-configured mail templates to subscribers per event (for example, new subscriber registration) – extremely useful converting visitors to subscribers by offering them free stuff or discounts for in exchange for subscribing to your list.
• Easily compose any messages with WYSIWYG editor.
• Import / Export contacts to and from other newsletters platforms with built-in import/export tool.
• Gather statistics like open rate and click rate of the emails sent.
• Use double opt-in procedures to comply with anti-spam regulations.

Installation and integration with WordPress

• Mailpress integrates “out-of-the-box” with WordPress, installation is as simple as installing any other plugin.
• Inviting visitors to subscribe to your mailing list is extremely easy as well;
  you can choose to:
  • Add the MP widget to the blog sidebar (as done here in TNP)
  • Add a shortcode to any post or page turning it to subscription form
    (see example at the end of this section)
  • Use the built in form editor to setup advanced subscription forms and gather custom, detailed information from visitors.

Example of Mailpress integration using shortcode

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Composing messages

Mailpress comes with WYSIWYG editor making it easy to compose, edit and saved drafts and mail templates.

As you edit your messaged you can save them, preview them in your browsers and send out test as you advance to see the results in your mail client. Mailpress also comes with image filter add-on that helps handling the images attached to your emails and keep them inline with the text. Once you’ve done composing the HTML version of the mail, you can use the “Plain text from HTML” button to copy the content of the html formatted version to the plain text one.

Support

Support for Mailpress is available in this Google group.

Limitation of Mailpress

There are some key points to keep in mind before choosing Mailpress.

• Mailpress documentation is a bit hazy, while it will help you get most of the things done. It is not the best one you’ll see.
• Email volume – Since mailpress is installed on your server, all emails will send out from your hosting provider. Providers usually have strict policies about the amount of emails you can send per day/month so best practice will be to check out with your provider how many emails you are allowed to send (This is usually a concern for huge lists of 3000+ members).
• Theme editor – Like WordPress itself, Mailpress support themes for mails. However, while WordPress has visual theme editors (Artisteer, WordPress #1 Theme Generator IMHO, to name one), Mailpress doesn’t. In order to customize a theme you’ll have to get your hand dirty writing down code – Doable but not too friendly.

Mailpress has over 120,000 downloads so far, making it very popular and wide spread plugin.

What do you think? How’s your Mailpress experience ?

As promised – Below you can find the Hebrew language files for Mailpress.
(FREE registration required to download).

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