EasyMail is an excellent choice for site owners who wish to send nicely styled HTML email broadcasts to their subscribers. It allows you to segment your subscribers and even group them by spoken language. It does not support scheduled autoresponders, though.
This plugin is not intended to be used by those who do heavy email marketing with autoresponders and have a list that has 10s of thousands of subscribers. It’s ideal for small to medium size lists.
The plugin is solid and it is freely available from WordPress.org.
Ease of Use and Installation
Installation is easy since EasyMail is a free plugin that’s available from WordPress.org. The plugin utilizes WordPress API fairly well, so the plugin has a native feel, which makes it easy to use. For example, the screen for adding a new newsletter looks just like the screen for adding and editing normal WordPress posts.
Generally, the admin screens of the plugin are styled very similarly to WordPress own settings screens. The admin UI is pretty well done and is easy to use.
Technical Support and Documentation
There’s no comprehensive user guide for the current version (v2) of the plugin. However, most of EasyMail‘s features and settings are self-explanatory and there’s pretty good in-plugin documentation. Additionally, there are other useful resources, such as the FAQs page and the technical documentation for developers.
If despite these resources you still needed help, you can ask for assistance on the WordPress.org forum of the plugin or the forum that’s hosted on the author’s own website. The author is active and helpful in both places.
Managing Subscribers and Mailing Lists
Unfortunately EasyMail doesn’t utilize WordPress API in managing subscribers. It does things its own way. I would have liked it if it used WordPress users capabilities to manage subscribers. But it is still functional and does the job.
It is possible with EasyMail to put subscribers into different mailing lists and you can even group subscribers by language! Before you can add a subscriber to a specific list, you’ll have to create the list in the options page of the plugin.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to capture custom fields about your subscribers with EasyMail–only the name and email are possible to capture.
The plugin fully supports the import and export of subscribers. You can add a single subscriber manually, you can import all of your WordPress registered users, you can import from a CSV file.
As for export, it is simple. You just click the “Export” button and EasyMail will display all of your subscribers and all of their data on the next page. You copy that and paste it into a normal txt file to which you can then give a CSV extension. This is a very practical and convenient way for the intended audience of this plugin, who don’t have a massive list of subscribers.
Opt-in Form Features
The only way to insert an opt-in form with EasyMail is by using the provided sidebar widget. The widget itself is pretty nice and has some neat Ajax features, but I still would have liked to see more flexibility and options with opt-in forms. For example, there is no way to insert an opt-in form through template tags or within post content
And it is difficult to utilize 3rd party opt-in form plugins with EasyMail because of the unconventional way EasyMail handles form submissions.
Sending Site Content Updates as Newsletters
When you’re creating a newsletter in EasyMail, you can select to include the content of a certain post in the newsletter. In this way, you’re able to send site content as a newsletter, but that’s not really an automatic update notification–it is manual.
EasyMail doesn’t have the ability to send automatic content update notifications.
HTML Emails, Themes, and Attachments
EasyMail handles HTML emails nicely. You can build your HTML in the visual editor of WordPress or by switching to the HTML editor when you’re composing your newsletter. The built-in templates of EasyMail are also made of HTML.
With EasyMail, you can pre-style your newsletter with one of the three built-in themes. And it is easy to build your own newsletter theme–just go to the themes folder within the plugin and you’ll find a themes_howto.txt file as well as the source files for existing themes, which you can use as a starting point.
It is also possible to style the opt-in form that EasyMail creates with your own CSS.
As for email attachments, they are not supported by EasyMail.
Money Matters
EasyMail is completely free–no strings attached.
