What’s new

A lot of fixes and improvements have been made to version 4.0. Most noticeable are the new ways to create forms and popups and how to use them on your site.

Block Forms

In Mailster 4.0, we introduce the third generation of form building for your websites. Creating sign-up forms for your newsletter is a fundamental feature of our newsletter plugin. With the new block editor integration, you can easily craft accessibility-ready forms and popups. These dynamic forms can be seamlessly placed anywhere on your site to enhance user engagement and subscription capabilities.

Automation

The second significant update introduces email marketing automation in Mailster. While this feature has been available since version 2.0, Mailster now offers a revamped approach to building customer journeys that is more intuitive and follows your users’ interactions logically.

With Mailster’s enhanced automation capabilities, you can design customer journeys that are triggered in diverse ways. This includes the ability to pause your automation and deliver timely and pertinent information precisely when it matters most in the user’s journey.

Templates

With Mailster 4.0 we are rolling out updates to all our templates, starting with our most used ones “Mailster” and “MyMail“.

With the template will focus on accessibility and support for right-to-left languages. (RTL)

Once you have Mailster 4.0 installed you will be prompted to update your templates.

Keep in mind that these new templates require at least Mailster 4!

How to upgrade?

Updates are free for all licensees. If your license has expired you either grab a new one or – if you bought it via Envato and your license has expired – head over to your Envatos download section to get it there.

Other changes

• Standardized rending of campaigns.
• Update geo API to use preferred single mmdb file instead of multiple data files
• Using a native date picker instead of jQuery UI elements
• Preparation for custom conditions
• Tags in conditions are now text fields and not dropdowns to make them more flexible.
• native support forms for Elementor
• native support forms for DIVI
• Performance improvements on querying action data from campaigns
• Performance improvements on data in the wp_options table
• Improvements in how admin notices are rendered
• Fully tested for PHP 8.1 (partially tested with PHP 8.2)
• Autocompletion on conditions
• Deprecated legacy forms
• The Newsletter Homepage is now based on blocks and block forms

Please check out the full changelog as well.

Required version

We at EverPress always like to support as many PHP and WordPress versions as possible. This however prevents using some newer features and may introduce unexpected security problems.

Starting with Mailster 4.0 we require to use at least

• PHP 7.4
• WordPress 6.2

That said, we always recommend going with the latest WordPress version and the recommended max PHP version from this table (PHP 8.1 for WP 6.3)

This article gives you a quick overview of the new features. Feel free to comment below if you have any additional questions.

Remove inactive Subscribers automatically

To keep you list clean and healthy it’s a good practice to remove unengaged subscribers from your lists. With Mailster 3.1 you can setup jobs to this for you. This is the first feature request we can marked as completed .

Jobs will run periodically and will mark affected subscribers as deleted. Once a subscriber is marked as deleted you can restore them for 14 days until they get removed from your database.

Learn more on Automation in our docs.

Manage Subscribers got a makeover

Big parts of our manage subscribers section has been rewriting to make im- and exporting easier then ever.

Most of our users import their lists from a spreadsheet app like Excel or Numbers so we made sure this works even better as before. You can also import your existing users directly from MailChimp without having to export them first. This makes it super easy to move away from MailChimp and start with Mailster.

We are working on adding more providers in the future so make sure to submit a feature request if you like to see others there as well.

Clean your lists up front with Kickbox (10% Discount)

We’ve partnered with Kickbox which helps you clean you existing lists before you import them into Mailster. Use the coupon code displayed on the import screen to get 10% discount on every purchase.

New relative conditions for date fields

Next to absolute time related conditions – e.g. “is on the” or “is after the” – you can use relative conditions like “younger than” or “older than”.

While this was needed for the automatic list cleanup you can use them now in your regular campaigns and auto responders too.

New subscriber status “deleted”

Whenever you delete a subscriber in Mailster 3.1 it will not get removed instantly but instead marked as deleted. You can then delete them permanently or restore them back. Mailster will automatically delete them 14 days after deletion.

Bonus: Filters in the subscriber overview

You are now able to apply every condition you can use in campaigns or on the manage subscribers page to your subscribers overview.

Conclusion

Mailster 3.1 makes your (email marketing)live easier, your list cleaner and helps you even more to target your audience.

The update is free for all licensee and available via your WordPress Dashboard.

If you don’t own a license yet buy one here.

Customers often facing problems when it comes to deliverability. In Mailster 3.0 we have focus to get your campaigns into your subscriber inboxes.

Test the Email Quality with the built in Pre-check Feature.

The new Pre-check Feature helps you find possible problems in your email campaigns before you hit the send button.

The new pre-check feature will replace the campaign preview screen as well the spam score check. It will give you an score between 0 and 100 (where 100 is the best).

With a click of a button Mailster will check following things of your campaign:

Messages

Find problems in your subject line or body copy. Count words and characters in your email as well the total email file size. There’s also an image-to-text ration which helps you to balance them.

Links

Checks all used links in the campaign and if they are reachable or blocked.

Images

Checks your used images if they are reachable on the internet and contain an alt tag for accessibility.

Spam Report

Gets you a SpamAssassin score which counts into your total score.

Authentication

Checks several authentication methods for your current delivery set up like SPF, DKIM or DMARC. Also checks the A and MX records of your sender.

Blocklist (Blacklist)

Checks the IP of your sender against over 50 blacklist services.

Security

We help you prevent false signups out of the box. It’s now more easy to block bots without an additional plugin.

With this new security settings Mailster makes it easy to help you prevent false signups and slo allow you to block certain domains or IP addresses.

We have redesigned our honeypot mechanism and incorporated an “anti-flood” mechanism to prevent multiple sign-ups in a given time frame.

Auto Batch Size Setting

While this sounds maybe a bit strange it’s exactly that: A setting to allow Mailster calculating the best send rate so your mails get out as fast as possible.

Check our article on the Knowledge base for more info on that.

PHP 8 Support

We have throughly test Mailster with PHP 8.0 and starting testing with 8.1. While the minimum required PHP version is still 5.3.6 it’s a good time to update your PHP version as we plan to increase the minimum PHP version in a future update..

New Templates and Add ons page.

Mailster supports a lot of templates and add-ons so we made it easier for you to find them and use them in your Email Marketing Software.

Conclusion

We are really happy with Mailster 3.0 and its foundation for your future email marketing platform.

The update is of course free for all licensee and available within the first week of September this year.

For anyone having issues or questions for this release we have extended your support to the end of September 2021.