This page will help you during the configuration of Newsletter: we want you to get the most out of it! Here, you’ll find an explanation of the parameters you need to set up when you start using the plugin. 

1. The Newsletter dedicated page. 

Newsletter needs a page to show service messages, like the activation, the welcome and goodbye messages. If you followed the configuration wizard, that page is created and pre-configured for you automatically.

You can find it in your blog page list, where you can also personalize its design. There is just one simple rule: the Newsletter page should be a regular Ideakit page that contains only the 

shortcode!

If you want to use another page, you have to add the shortcode and select it on the Newsletter “General Settings” as the dedicated page, so the plugin knows where to redirect the subscribers when they perform an action and when service messages need to be shown. 

Important notes

1. If the selected page is deleted or unpublished or if you remove/change the 
   First name

   Last name

   Email

    By continuing, you accept the privacy policy
    shortcode, it may appear a 404 error page. In this case, check the configuration!
2. Pay attention not to use any other Newsletter shortcode on the dedicated page, as for example 
   First name

   Last name

   Email

    By continuing, you accept the privacy policy
   : although the page may look exactly the same, they won’t show the service messages! 
3. If you want to customize the layout of the Newsletter dedicated page, we suggest checking if your theme has the option to change the layout at the page level. You can even create a custom template page in your theme (or in a child theme) or use the same layout of your landing pages, which are usually simpler than the regular ones.
4. If you add other text to the dedicated page, it will be shown every time a service message is displayed, so be careful!

2. The sender

The sender is “who” is sending emails to your subscribers. With “who” we mean a name (for example your name if yours is a personal blog or your brand name, if it is a company blog) and an email address. When you installed Newsletter for the first time, you configured this up through the welcome wizard. 

Usually, the best choice is to use an email address from your domain with a real mailbox behind. Some providers do not allow to send emails with a fake sender (for example [email protected]). 

Important notes:

1. Never use as email address from free services as gmail, yahoo, aol, outlook and so on. Your blog (server) is not allowed to send emails for those accounts!
2. Always perform some email tests. Go on the Newsletter Dashboard and click on “Status” to check if everything is set up correctly, to perform a test and to verify if there are any delivery issues. 
3. Sometimes it happens that your emails are sent with a different email address or name from the one you’ve chosen on Newsletter. This may happen for two reasons:
   
   a. You have a SMTP plugin installed or a plugin that redirects all emails sent from your blog to an external delivery service. Those plugins let you set up an email and name and can eventually overwrite the ones you set on Newsletter. Have a look and disable those options.

3. Return path

The return path is an email address where all the undelivered messages are returned. If you set a real mailbox as the return path, remember to check it to remove from your lists the addressed that are no longer reachable.

If you use a third party delivery service (Sendgrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun, …) integrated with one of our addons, you don’t need to setup the bounce checking it is provided automatically.

Keep in mind that some providers do not allow to specify a return path address since they forces their own. 

4. Reply to

The Reply to option is an additional service. You can specify an email where to receive messages if a subscriber wants to reply to your newsletter. 

Important notes: Be sure that you specify a valid email address. If possible, use an email address from your domain. 

5. Delivery speed

Max emails per hour

Newsletter has a delivery engine that sends out emails as quickly as configured. This configuration is important since providers don’t like blogs on shared web spaces that send out tons of emails in a limited time frame.

You should always ask your provider which is the limit they will tolerate.

Even on a private server, setting this limit to a reasonable value is a good idea to avoid saturating the server with queued email. This limit is internally divided by 12 since Newsletter sends a batch of emails every five minutes.

If you experience a lower delivery speed than set, remember that Newsletter can internally lower that value if it detects a PHP max execution timeout that does not let you send all planned emails in a run. By enabling the logger at info level and by looking at the generated log file, you can see this situation clearly reported.

Advanced settings

Here you can modify some other aspects of Newsletter, including roles, tracking and debug. 

Custom CSS

This function allows advanced users to personalize some aspects of the design of forms, fonts, buttons etc. Just write down the code and you are good to go. 

Allowed Roles

This option allows you to choose who can access Newsletter. The options are based on the roles you configured on Ideakit (e.g. if you select Editors, every user with the Editor role will have access to Newsletter). Additional roles can be created by Teams or other plugins. 

Note: some functionalities of Newsletter or Addons are available exclusively to the administrator role since they usually need a one time configuration and may contain sensible information.

Log level

Every Newsletter component (and even the professional addons) can log their internal state and errors. The log level selects the level of detail those log should have. 

Tracking default

It sets the default open and clic tracking for new newsletters. The value is just a preset, it can be changed on every single newsletter before sending.

IP addresses

This option allows you to select if the IP address of your sites should be stored, anonymized or not stored at all. The IP address is collected at the time of the subscription and is useful to have detailed statistics (read and click tracking). Anonymized IP addresses are changed by removing the last number of the address and replacing it with zero. 

Debug mode

It intercepts even the PHP errors and logs them in a specific log file. When in debug mode, an admin warning is always present and the use should be limited to debug sessions. Do not let this mode always active!

Email encoding

This option defines how a email message is internally encoded. Usually, the default options works perfectly. Sometimes, old mail servers with have problems in managing messages with long lines: in this case, try to set it to “base 64”. 

Shortcodes

This option enables Newsletter to execute shortcodes that you put inside your newsletter. Of course shortcodes can generated invalid HTML for an email, so use with care.