maennchen1 Newsletter Germany turns WordPress into a newsletter system. Subscribers live in tables of your own WordPress database, and mail is sent over the mail path of your own server. No subscriber address and no sending statistic is handed to a third party, because there is no third party involved.

The plugin was written for German and European operators, where data protection law makes the location of subscriber data a practical question rather than a preference.

New posts go out by themselves

Switch on post notification, and every post you publish reaches your subscribers by mail: each one on its own, or collected into one digest, daily or weekly. You choose the groups, the categories and the template. A delay of a few minutes leaves time to fix a typo, and each notification is an ordinary newsletter that you can still change before it goes out.

What it does

A subscription form for your site, as a block, a shortcode or a widget
Double opt-in, with a confirmation mail the operator writes
An unsubscribe link in every mail: one click, no login (or confirmed by mail, if you prefer)
Subscriber groups, so one newsletter can go to a chosen audience
Newsletters in HTML and plain text, sent as multipart mail
Scheduled sending over WP-Cron, in batches sized for shared hosting
An archive page and a browser view for readers whose mail client mangles HTML
Placeholders such as %abo_vorname% anywhere in subject and body
Layout templates, and your own templates in an upload folder that updates never touch

Optional modules

Each of these is switched on or off under Newsletter > Configuration > Modules:

A sending log of who received which newsletter
Placeholder rules, for example for salutations
Post notification, immediately or collected as a daily or weekly summary
Spam protection for the subscription and unsubscription form, without a puzzle, without a third party and without storing an IP address

Requirements

PHP 8.1 or newer with the extensions dom and simplexml. A working mail path on the server — either PHP mail, an SMTP account or wp_mail.

More

Manual, in English and German
Paid edition with further modules, sold separately (website in German)

External services

This plugin contacts no server of the manufacturer and no third-party service. Mail goes out over the mail path of your own server, and no subscriber data leaves your installation.

One setting fetches content from elsewhere: with “Embed images in the mail” switched on, the plugin downloads every image used in a newsletter from the address it is hosted at (usually your own site) and attaches it to the mail. Nothing is sent along except the request for the image. The setting is off by default.