Superfast Newsletters with Mailgun

Sending newsletters directly from your WordPress site may be an easy solution, but it runs into severe limitations when you have a large mailing list, say more than 1000 subscribers. I discussed that in my previous post.

Using Mailgun as your email delivery provider in combination with the Newsletter plugin is a great solution that avoids the deliverability issues associated with shared hosting.

Newsletters too slow?

The standard Mailgun add-on for Newsletter sends only one email at a time through the Mailgun API. With the “Turbo” option, you may be able to increase the speed by sending up to 10 requests at a time, if your installation supports that.

But that still means 10,000 API requests in order to send your newsletter to 10,000 subscribers. This puts a significant strain on your website. Just as importantly, it will take a long time before all your subscribers receive your newsletter.

A superfast solution

Fortunately, Mailgun has a “Batch Send” API that allows you to send an email to up to 1,000 addresses in a single API call. For 25,000 subscribers, that’s 25 API calls instead of 25,000 calls. Quite a difference. It will take a lot less time to send out your newsletter.

The Superfast Mailgun add-on for the Newsletter plugin allows you to take full advantage of this capability and thus greatly speed up the delivery of your newsletters, so that all your subscribers receive your newsletter on time.

The free version of Superfast Mailgun is available from your WordPress dashboard and on wordpress.org. Once you install it, you can easily upgrade to the paid version which offers the full range of features.

Features

Sends newsletters to up to 120,000 subscribers per hour.

By sending the email once in a single request with 1,000 destination addresses, the load on your server is greatly reduced.

Actual delivery delay depends on Mailgun.

Polls Mailgun for “bounces” and updates your mailing list accordingly.

This allows you to remove invalid and obsolete email addresses from your list.

Retrieves “open” and “click” events from Mailgun.

Polling ensures that you won’t miss any events even if your site is down for maintenance.

Integrates with the Statistics add-on that is part of the Newsletter premium extensions.

Polling frequency is adjustable.

Default is every 30 minutes.

For quicker up-to-date statistics, it can be set to every 20 or 10 minutes.

Alternate routing for transactional emails.

You can choose to route transactional emails (e.g. Welcome email, subscription confirmation) through the same route as other emails from your WordPress site.

Priority Support for Pro customers.

Priority email support for Pro customers.

1 year of Pro updates.

Easy updates from the WordPress dashboard.

Pricing

Free

Unlimited sites

Up to 1,200 emails / hour 

Free updates

Support on wordpress.org forum

Webmaster

$19

3 sites

Up to 120,000 emails / hour

One year of Pro updates

One year of priority support

Open/Click statistics*

Selectable polling frequency

Transactional emails can use a different route

30-day money back warranty

Popular

Agency

$59

Unlimited sites

Up to 120,000 emails / hour

One year of Pro updates

One year of priority support

Open/Click statistics*

Selectable polling frequency

Transactional emails can use a different route

30-day money back warranty

* Requires the Reports add-on (a Newsletter premium extension)

We sell our products using Freemius secure checkout, which enables secure online payments, licensing, fulfillment, and more. The service automatically adds cookies when a user opens the checkout. Those are essential cookies for security, fraud detection & prevention, and completion of a purchase. There’s no way to check out without letting the service use cookies. Here’s a link to the Freemius privacy policy and its checkout cookie policy. If you wish to opt-out of Freemius’ cookies setting please go to their cookie policy and follow their opt-out instructions.

Try it for free

Don’t take our word for it. Install the free version and give it a try. You can easily upgrade to the Pro version from within WordPress.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *