Owldraft Newsletter – Email New Posts to Subscribers

Description

Owldraft Newsletter turns your WordPress posts into a newsletter, like Substack but on your own site. Publish a post and every subscriber gets it as an email: the whole post, laid out for the inbox, under your own name and your own domain.

• Your list, in your WordPress. Subscribers live in your own database, not on someone else’s platform. Import a CSV from anywhere, export it any time.
• Your brand. Your logo, your colour, your domain in the From line.
• A beautiful email. Blocks become clean, inbox-safe HTML: images, quotes, buttons, tables, code and video embeds all work in Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook.
• Your own sending account. Emails go out through your Resend account, so deliverability is yours too. Resend’s free plan covers up to 1,000 contacts.

What it does

• Send on publish. A “Newsletter” panel in the editor: send this post as an email when it is published, send a test to yourself, preview it in a new tab. A post is never sent twice.
• Subscribe form. A Subscribe block and a [owldraft_newsletter_subscribe] shortcode, with double opt-in and spam protection.
• One list, one click to leave. Every subscriber gets every post, and the Unsubscribe link in each email works in one click, on your site.
• Reader account page. Readers sign in with a magic link (no passwords, no WordPress accounts) to change their name or unsubscribe.
• Subscribers screen. Search, add, edit and delete subscribers. CSV import (Substack, beehiiv, Ghost, Mailchimp, Kit or any file with an email column) and CSV export.
• Two-way sync with Resend. Unsubscribes, bounces and spam complaints come back to WordPress through a signed webhook.
• Email results per post. Delivered, bounced, marked as spam and unsubscribed, from Resend’s events. No open or click tracking.
• Email Design. Logo, site name and brand colour, with a live preview built from your real posts and a Send test button.
• Guided setup. Connect your Resend API key, add and verify your sending domain (with the DNS records to copy), set your sender addresses and postal address, and send a test email, step by step.
• Deliverability check. One click sends a test to our checker and shows what the receiving server saw: SPF, DKIM and DMARC, each with what to fix.
• Optional watch from owldraft.com. Add our watch address to your list and we tell you when a newsletter does not arrive, or arrives failing SPF, DKIM or DMARC. Off until you tick it.

More about the plugin: owldraft.com/plugins/owldraft-newsletter.

See more demos, each with a newsletter signup form: Evermag demos and Stoat demos.

Requirements

• A Resend account (free to start) and a domain you can add DNS records to.

External services

The plugin connects to the following services. Nothing is sent to any of them until you connect your Resend API key in Newsletter > Setup.

Resend

Resend is the email service that sends your newsletters. The plugin calls the Resend API (https://api.resend.com) with your own API key to:

• list, add and verify your sending domains;
• create the segment, contact property and webhook your newsletter uses;
• keep subscribers in sync as contacts: email address, first and last name, subscription status and an unsubscribe key;
• send newsletters, test emails and sign-in links: the email’s subject, HTML and text, the sender and the recipients.

Resend calls back to your site’s REST API (a signed webhook) with delivery events: delivered, bounced, complained, unsubscribed, delayed and failed.

Resend Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

owldraft.com (optional, off until you use it)

Owldraft, the maker of this plugin, runs three optional services at owldraft.com. None is used until you click or tick it in Newsletter > Setup.

• Deliverability check (the button in step 5): sends one test email, through your Resend account, to check@owldraft.com. owldraft.com records the sender address and what SPF, DKIM and DMARC said when it arrived; the plugin reads that back from https://api.owldraft.com/newsletter/v1/check/ with a random one-off token. The email itself holds only your site’s name and address.
• Watch subscriber (step 7, unticked by default): adds first-subscriber@owldraft.com to your list as an ordinary subscriber, so owldraft.com receives each newsletter like any reader does and records its sender, subject, arrival time and SPF/DKIM/DMARC result. Unticking it, or deleting it from Subscribers, removes it.
• Send reports (step 7, unticked by default): after each newsletter, sends to https://api.owldraft.com/newsletter/v1/sent your site’s address, the plugin version, the domain you send from, how many subscribers it went to, whether it was sent or failed, Resend’s error message if it failed, and Resend’s id for the send. No subscriber’s address or post content is ever sent.

Owldraft Terms and Privacy Policy.

YouTube and Vimeo thumbnails

When a post you send has a YouTube or Vimeo embed, the plugin downloads the video’s thumbnail image once, from https://i.ytimg.com or https://i.vimeocdn.com, and saves a copy on your site so the email can show it. Only the video’s thumbnail address is requested; no data about you or your readers is sent.

YouTube: Terms of Service and Google Privacy Policy. Vimeo: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.