Functional Email Subscriber and Campaign/Email Sender

I rated it good (3/5).

Positives:

So far, it has worked with sending a few campaign email alerts to subscribers informing them to new blog posts. Also, the subscribe button and other features have worked for me, as described.

Also, the tech support team was prompt in responding to my questions.

Area for improvement:

The one drawback I’m aware of regarding the non-premium plugin is that it doesn’t send email notifications to subscribers directly after publication, or even in batches every 15 minues or so.

What it is programmed to do, quite oddly, is to hold emails in a queue and then begin sending them only after a visitor visits the underlying website.

So, for blogs that don’t have many subscribers and those subscribers expect to get an email alert about new blog posts rather than their needing to continually visit and check the site, then this plugin will disappoint — because one will have to manually release the emails that are held the queue each time a new post is published.

This isn’t a deal-breaker, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Especially since one of the main reasons I’m using it is to automate the email alerts to subscribers informing them that a new post is available…so they could then visit the site (not the reverse).

Why would the default be to hold emails until someone visits the site?? That could be many hours or several days for a small blog with just a few subscribers. Makes no sense.

Anyway, the support threads don’t explain the reasoning, just that it uses WP Cron, which will send the emails after a visitor visits the site.

I have a more active website so I’ll look into using a different plugin/provider that sends the email alerts automatically after publication, without using the queue.

For my small blog, I’ll keep using this plugin for now, at least in the short run, since it’s already setup.