Admin gets several emails

As previously covered in the FAQ section there are different subscriber types and different email preferences.

Each different email type is sent to admin with subscribers emails entered into the BCC Header (blind closed copy). This means your subscriber have the privacy of their email address maintained.

There are a maximum of three different emails types:

• Plain Text - Excerpt
• Plain Text - Full Post
• HTML - Full Post

Emails are not sent if there are no subscribers but if there are subscribers admin will get a copy of the email.

Additionally, if you are on a host that restricts BCC: header length you can set DREAMHOST to TRUE in the code to construct emaisl with size limited BCC: headers. This means your users will get the notification with the ddrawback being admin will get an email for every 30 subscribers.

Future Posts / Daily Digests don’t work

Future Posts and Daily Digest emails both rely on another plugin to function.

Both features set a future event in order to complete the task and this future event is defined as part of WP-Cron, an excellent plugin written by Skippy.

If you don’t have WP-Cron activated on your WordPress installation these features will not work (despite being available).

Emails aren’t being sent

This is far too common a problem and in my experience is almost 100% down to server settings (apart from the one time I coded a bug into the email headers!).

SPAM is your enemy here. Many blog hosts are blocking or placing restrictions on the email sending capabilities of their servers (and rightly so!).

Subscribe2 sends emails to admin and puts subscribers email addresses into the Bcc: header space. Bcc: is used so that individual subscribers email addresses remain private to everyone except the blog admin.

If emails are “not arriving” check the following first:

• Do other emails from your site arrive (e.g. WordPress registrations) - if not check if you host is allowing email sending, check you aren’t using an “off domain” email address as the sender
• Are some users getting the emails and others not - check with your host for restriction relating to emails and get users to check their SPAM folders
• Do regular publication emails arrive but future posts and digest emails don’t - you need WP-Cron for future posts and daily digest functionality

In summary lots of people use this plugin every day without problems - the issue is most likely with your set up or host.

However, there is some work-around functionality built into the plugin to cope with hosts who cap the number of recipients per email. There is a setting in the plugin specified as follows:

define('DREAMHOST', false);

(The reason the setting is called DREAMHOST is because this is the name of a hosting provider that caps the number of recipients per email!)

Anyway, set this to true in order to limit the number of recipients per email to 30. This may solve “No email” problems due to host email restrictions.

HTML email

Subscribe2 allows Registered Users the option to receive emails in HTML format. Public Subscribers will only receive plain text emails containing an excerpt of the post.

The additional options given to registered users are intended to provide an incentive to sign up to the blog.

HTML emails are not officially supported for non-registered users. If you want this functionality please feel free to amend the code yourself or you can contact me for a fee-payable bespoke solution.

Subscriber types

Subscribe2 supports 2 different user types:

• Public Subscribers
• Registered Subscribers

Public Subscribers submit only their email address using the Subscribe2 form. They will receive an excerpt for each post made to the blog provided you have not published it to a category that you have defined as excluded in Options -> Subscribe2.

Registered Subscribers are users who have registered with your blog. They will have an additional option area under Users -> Subscription. This area allows them to choose which categories they would like to receive notifications about and also allows them to choose the email format.

In the Manage -> Subscribers window you will see the different subscriber types. Registered on the right, confirmed public subscribers in the middle and unconfirmed public subscribers on the left.

In this panel administrators of blogs can manually add new public subscribers, confirm incomplete public subscribers and bulk subscribe registered users to defined categories.