Emailing to groups - any good plugins?

Hi, I’ve been using the “email-users” plugin for years in combination with s2member to send out emails to different member levels. However, it seems to have stopped working as we have now got over 1000 members. It no longer shows any groups in the “send to group” button.
I tried wp-email-users and it is REALLY broken, sending out blank emails to all our list (ooops!!!). Lots of people complaining about that one.
SO … is there another way to send out emails to a selected number of membership levels? What are you using to do that? THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!
(automation not required, we do this manually)

Interesting! I use the same plugin and I can message my free users (much more than 1000 users, I don’t have those many paying subscribers, though, LOL).

Did you check your mail server limitations? I know that I have to use my own server to send those messages because my mail provider won’t allow more than a dozen or two on BCC.

Also, I use Post SMTP plugin for my mail settings. Not sure you might be having problems if using Wordpress’ native mail support.

also can be your email provider - e.g. if you use gmail (also with you own domain) they limit the number of emails you can send out within 1 hour or so (more complicated calculation - suffice to say there are limits per minute, or per more minutes or hour or day).

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Yep, Exactly! I use Yandex and when I send those group messages I can’t send them, then I have my own server as a secondary smtps alternative which I only use under those circumstances and it works well. Always double check all emails are (kind of) good in your mailing list to prevent going to an anti spam list, though. I always do some housekeeping on my user list before sending those messages and I remove all users that create accounts but never log in, since it usually means they provided an invalid email address (even gmail ones can be “baits”, so if someone registered more than a few days ago and never logged in, I delete their accounts before sending those batch messages :wink:).

I hope you get it working soon!

not in this case - the plugin would no longer allow me to select any groups other than admin, editor and subscriber.
No matter - I’ve hacked the plugin to make it work again.

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Glad you fixed it!

I’d still like to know if there are any good alternatives! It seems odd to rely on a plugin which hasn’t changed for so long and doesn’t have any active development. AND it’s such an obvious thing to want to do, I think.

Well, I don’t know of any free alternatives. If you look into Wordpress’ Plugins Gallery you’ll see almost all options involve you having to give them access to your email list, so they can take that data (and likely resell it) on top of sending the mail from their servers, usually at a cost (unless a few of them, but only if you have a few hundred users to email etc).

There’s tons of awesome free plugins to do many things, but they exist when their developers “feel like creating and maintaining” them. Even paid plugins go abandoned (or partially abandoned)… Can’t expect more from free ones :wink:

To be honest, that happens across the entire industry. Microsoft products aren’t awful, but in spite of their products being paid, users keep complaining about the same issues for years and they just don’t care to improve their offering, because people keep buying and spending and with (almost) nowhere else to go… :worried: