Wordpress Notifications By Email
June 21, 2010 1:55 AM   Subscribe

Wordpress - looking for options to notify subscribers of new posts by email.

How can get a set of users to be notified by email whenever a new post is created on our Wordpress blog ?

There are Wordpress plugins but the hoster (DreamHost) limits the emails/hour sent by a domain and I'm concerned that when a new post takes place the notifications will break the limit.

Dreamhost allows 'Announce Lists' which are not limited by emails/hour but it's hard to see how the plugins will work with those.

I thought there might be a third party service which would parse the RSS and drive email notifications off that but I can't find anything.

Any one got any experience of doing this ? In particular for Dreamhost but stories about email notification plugins generally welcome
posted by southof40 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
 
Feedburner has this functionality, as well as a lot of e-mail marketing providers - they usually call it RSS to e-mail. Check out Feedblitz and MailChimp. I use AWeber for this service, mainly because they are the cheapest for my needs.
posted by ukdanae at 2:17 AM on June 21, 2010 [2 favorites]


Feedburner does it for free. I've used it and it's low-frills, but pretty effective. It's the "Email Subscriptions" option under the "Publicize" tab. Here's their Wordpress QuickStart Guide, including instructions on how to set up email subscriptions.
posted by ourobouros at 7:03 AM on June 21, 2010


I've been using the Subscribe2 plugin on a LAMP server and it's worked nicely. It uses PHP to send email, which in turn uses an MTA like sendmail. From a cursory look at the dreamhost feature, though, I don't think it would be easy or even feasible to route Subscribe2's blasts through the dreamhost script. Unless you want to run your own virtual server, the feedburner option looks best.
posted by cowbellemoo at 7:24 AM on June 21, 2010


I use DreamHost and Subscribe2 and have never had a problem. Am I reading correctly that you would like to *avoid* going through DreamHost (and possibly hitting the max emails/hour), not that you *want* to go through DreamHost? If so, I think Subscribe2 would work great.
posted by librarina at 11:14 PM on June 21, 2010


Response by poster: I'm sorry I thought I had replied 12 hours ago but somehow I did not.

@ukdanae, @ourobouros - thanks for the pointer at Feedburner, that certainly looks like the functionality I was after in a third party service.

@cowbellemoo - thanks for the pointer to Subscribe2 - that looks like just what I wanted if I could get it to play with Dreamhost

@librarina - Great that you have Subscribe2 and DH experience ! Just to clarify I do wish to carry on using DreamHost (it's not actually me but my kids school) but am concerned that the users of the blog would inadvertently max out the emails/hour by posting several posts in an hour and so exceeding the limit. How do you cope with this ? As you probably know DH have 'announcement lists' which are not limited by emails/hour but I presume it's not possible to hook Subscribe up to one of those .... or maybe that's what you have done ?
posted by southof40 at 4:19 AM on June 23, 2010


southof40, I'm not sure what you want to do. I get that you want to stay with DreamHost hosting. But do you WANT to use the DreamHost announcement lists, because you've already got people signed up for them (or for some other reason)? or do you NOT want to use them, because their use may max out your DreamHost emails/hour?

I do not have any DreamHost announcement lists. I just have people signed up through the Subscribe2. I don't post very often and I don't have very many readers. As far as I can tell, the people who get emails via Subscribe2 do NOT affect my DreamHost emails per hour. As cowbellemoo was describing, it's using a completely different mechanism to send the mails, and is not at all connected with DreamHost's lists or servers. WordPress is doing it all.

Basically:
If you want to use your existing DreamHost announcement lists to send email via Subscribe2, it will be hard.
If you want to have people sign up starting NOW and get emails via Subscribe2, it will not be hard, and I and previous posters think it will not affect your DreamHost email quota.

Really I think the fact that you're with DreamHost is a red herring. WordPress and all associated plugins and whatnot are the same regardless of where you are hosted. (Please correct me, people who know more ...)
posted by librarina at 9:42 PM on June 23, 2010


Response by poster: @libarina - Thanks for your reply and for letting me know how you do this stuff.

I don't have any existing DH announcement lists I only mentioned them because (as you know) they are a mechanism within DH that would allow me by bypass the emails/hour quota (Announcement lists have other restrictions but not in terms of emails/hour).

With respect I think you may have misread what @cowbellemoo said. She (presumably?) mentioned that PHP talks to the MTA and so on. This does indeed involve a different DH limit (I think 200/hour rather than 100/hour) but there is still a, quite low, limit.

I think in essence what matters here is whether or not emails sent by a standard subscribe2 install effects the emails/hour quota on DH.

I've just installed S2 on one of my other blogs and used the 'send preview email' feature. Looking at those emails it appears the only mailservers used are DH ones so I think emails from S2 must surely effect the emails/hour quota. Strangely enough there doesn't appear to be anything within the DH control panel that allows you see 'emails sent in last hour' so i can only go off the email headers.

So anyway thanks again for your thoughts and knowledge of use. I'm pleased to have found Subscribe2 for use within other hosters or with DH where the number of people involved will be quite low but I think for this case we might use FeedBurner.
posted by southof40 at 4:47 PM on June 24, 2010


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