1. Strengthened Domain Authentication

Key to these updates is the need for stricter domain authentication. This involves aligning with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) standards and adhering to Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) policies. For optimal deliverability, senders should:

• Adopt verified domain identities, ensuring domain-aligned DKIM signatures.
• Configure a custom MAIL FROM domain for SPF alignment.
• Be strategic with subdomains, using different ones for various email types.
• Publish and regularly update DMARC policies.

2. Simplified Unsubscribe Mechanism

To further empower recipients, the new guidelines require a more straightforward unsubscribe process. This includes:

• Implementing one-click unsubscribe headers in emails.
• Ensuring the unsubscribe process is compliant and efficient, with requests honored within two days.
• Rethinking email list-building practices to avoid high spam complaint rates.

3. Proactive Spam Rate Monitoring

Maintaining low spam complaint rates is crucial. Monitoring and adjusting strategies based on recipient feedback will be essential in staying compliant with the new regulations.

Adapting to Change

These changes necessitate a shift in how email marketers approach their campaigns. It’s about balancing effective communication with respecting recipient preferences. By adhering to these best practices, marketers can improve their email deliverability and maintain a positive sender reputation.

Understanding the Changes

Gmail and Yahoo’s latest move aims to enhance inbox security and improve the email ecosystem. These changes include several best practices that have been long-standing in the industry but are now mandatory. It’s essential for businesses, especially bulk senders, to understand and adapt to these new requirements to ensure uninterrupted email delivery and maintain a good sender reputation.

Who will be affected by these new requirements?

Senders who dispatch a minimum of 5,000 emails per day.

When will these requirements be implemented?

These requirements are set to be implemented starting in February 2024.

Why do we recommend to fulfill these requirements in any case?

Email abuse is widespread in the world of electronic communication. Although mailbox providers strive tirelessly to protect their customers, it’s increasingly important for senders to share in this responsibility.

Balancing the recognition of legitimate senders while filtering out spam and phishing attempts from users’ inboxes poses a significant challenge.

Email Health Check

Starting in Mailster 3.3.13 we have implemented a simple check people can utilize to check their current email settings.

Read more about the Email Health Check on our knowledge base.

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.

Organically grow your email list.

If you grow your email list organically, the chances for your email addresses to be valid are higher. With an organically grown list you reach people who really are interested in your product. Engagement will be higher than with a bought list.

Personalize your emails.

Personalized emails are more relevant to subscribers than generic ones. They are directly targeted at the subscribers, they address them by their names and introduce them to offers that are relevant to their interests.

Use email marketing automation.

Automatic email campaigns are set up once, then they automatically send emails to your subscribers when they meet a certain trigger. They reach subscribers at an optimized time and are highly relevant to them. So they are opened and clicked more frequently than generic emails.

Provide good copy with correct spelling.

You strengthen your credibility when you write good, interesting texts and get grammar and spelling right.

Send email at the right time – keep users’ time zones in mind.

Good times for sending emails are 10 am, when people arrived at the workplace, or at around 1 pm, when they check their emails after lunch. 23 % of all emails are opened in the first hour after delivery. After 24 hours, the chance that an email will be opened drops to 1 %! So make sure you take your subscribers´ time zones into consideration!

Don’t talk about your service too much.

Do not turn your email into a sales pitch. Instead, show your subscribers what you can offer them and provide them with relevant news and information.

Don’t buy an email list.

Buying an email list doesn’t bring your business forward. Your emails won’t reach people who are really interested in your product or service.

Don’t send out emails that aren’t personalized.

Customers do not appreciate emails that don’t deliver content that is personalized for them. Personalization increases the chances that your emails are opened by 26 %.

Never send out emails that do not have a preheader text.

The preheader text is the short summary text that follows the subject line when viewing an email from the inbox. It tells your subscribers what the email is about and gives them a reason to open it.

Don’t send out emails to all your subscribers at the same time.

23 % of all emails are opened in the first hour after delivery. Take your subscribers’ time zones into consideration and make sure they are awake when your email is delivered.

Apple expects the new mail privacy protection features to launch between September and November 2021.

The goal of this update is to prevent senders from collecting information about the user. It stops information gathering (like knowing when an email gets opened) while masking their IP address.

That means someone’s email usage becomes unlinked from their other online activities. It also prevents senders from determining their location.

How Mail Privacy Protection from Apple Works

The new features offered by Apple for email privacy with iOS 15 are an opt-in system. When individuals first open their email through an affected operating system or app, it will prompt them to protect their mail activity or leave it unprotected.

People must actively choose to have their email protected with these privacy features. Although it isn’t known how many will choose this service, similar transparency efforts have shown that 95% or more will use the new service.

When an individual chooses to protect their mail activity, several events take place to prevent user tracking.

1. When the app starts, Apple Mail triggers an email download to the device from the sender’s ESP (email service provider) or the web host.
2. At that time, Apple caches the images included in the message, creating a copy of them that gets saved at a new location through its Privacy Cache. An IP address assignment reflects the subscriber’s general region instead of offering a particular geo-location.
3. Apple must request the images from the ESP server as part of the caching process. That includes the tracking data, making the provider believe that the user has opened their email.
4. When the subscriber reviews their message, the request triggers a download of the images from Apple that display. It comes from the Cache instead of the ESP server or the web host, preventing senders from knowing user behavior.

Subscribers will need to have an active connection to a wireless network with the app running in the background to take advantage of these features.

The privacy features apply to all email services. It could be a work account, Gmail, or Outlook, but it only works when routed through the Apple Mail app.

What Does the Privacy Feature Mean for Email Marketing?

The movement to allow users to control their data has been slowly building over the past few years.

It starts with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. This law gives people the right to remove personal data, making it anonymous information from a marketing stance.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) delivers another set of privacy protections that marketers must balance.

There is even the discussion of having third-party cookies removed from the browsing experience. That means it was only a matter of time before email privacy became part of that equation.

That means the open rate will not be a helpful metric to evaluate a campaign’s effectiveness once the privacy features go live. Since Apple will essentially “open” the message first, anyone with an audience that skews towards iOS 15 products or macOS Monterey will see inflated percentages.

In 2021, Apple iPhone was the top email client people used, with over 38% stating it was their primary service. Apple Mail contributes another 9.9%, with Apple iPad adding another 1.2%.

That means over half of the average audience is using Apple and could end up opting in for the new privacy features.

The Privacy Feature Could Impact Email Relevance

Since senders are using the information about open rates to determine when people view emails, the concern is that the messaging will become less relevant.

That means you might not get messages when you typically eat dinner about the latest specials at a local pizzeria. It could also affect subject line testing, A/B evaluation, and retargeting after someone opens a message without clicking through for conversions.

Although the changes sound negative, there is a potential bright spot. When marketers send email blasts that don’t get a lot of opens, it hurts deliverability. With Apple essentially opening the message to take a snapshot of it, there could be fewer items snagged by the spam filter.

The businesses most affected by this change are those that monetize audiences based on email content. Marketing techniques will evolve once the privacy features get released, but until then, everyone needs to be prepared for potential disruptions.

How will Mailster handle the changes?

We are watching the changes on iOS 15 and check how others handle opens via the private relay. Since other services may also adopt you should count opens as less relevant and may change your automations based on this knowledge.

We’ll push updates on our plugin once the changes go live later this month.

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.