Description

The Newsletter Plugin is great for generating HTML newsletters. Its sophisticated Drag & Drop Composer makes it very easy to create a newsletter that looks good and renders well in a variety of email readers.

But it is generally considered good practice to include “plain text” version of the newsletter as well.

Plaintext for the Newsletter plugin adds a new item “Plaintext” in the Newsletter Settings menu. The Plaintext Settings panel has two options:

Auto-generate plain text for newsletters
- When this is set to “Yes”, a plain text version of each newsletter is automatically created just before the newsletter is sent.
  This overrides the “textual version” on the newsletter’s Advanced settings panel.
- When this is set to “No”, a command is added to the newsletter’s Edit/Advanced panel that allows you to manually trigger the creation of a plain text version and customize it if necessary.
Auto-generate plain text for transactional emails
Examples of transactional emails: the Welcome message, the Activation email, the Goodbye email.
When enabled, this overrides the default text version generated by the Newsletter plugin for the Welcome message and the Activation email since version 7.0.0.

The plain text version is created by reading the HTML version of the email and removing the formatting. Images are replaced by their “alt” tag and links are shown in brackets.

For an example, see my blog.

This add-on is compatible with

WordPress default mailer, if configured
the Newsletter plugin’s built-in SMTP mailer (in Newsletter plugin versions before 7.0.9)
all Newsletter plugin’s mail delivery integration add-ons (e.g. SMTP, SendGrid, etc)
the Superfast Mailgun for the Newsletter plugin add-on
the Mailgun for WordPress plugin when configured to use SMTP
certain other third-party mail plugins, e.g. WP Mail SMTP and Easy WP SMTP

This add-on is not compatible with mailer plugins that replaces the wp_mail() function (e.g. Mailgun for WordPress configured to use the HTTP API). In that case, a warning will be displayed on the Plaintext options page.

Please provide feedback on the Support forum. Thanks!

Screenshots

Plaintext Settings
Newsletter admin page with added Auto-generate command

Installation

This add-on will only work if you have The Newsletter Plugin installed.

To use the Plaintext add-on, just install it like any other plugin. The settings menu is integrated with the Newsletter’s menus.

Reviews

terry789 March 7, 2022 1 reply

Hello, thank you for this plugin! Several of my sent newsletters came back because my IP would be on a blacklist. After some research it turned out that my plain text did not match the HTML content. With this plugin this solved and now the providers that first refused to deliver my newsletters now seem to do so. Thanks!

Read all 1 review

Contributors & Developers

“Plaintext for the Newsletter plugin” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

franciscus

Translate “Plaintext for the Newsletter plugin” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

Version 2.4

Fixed PHP Notice “Undefined index”.

Version 2.3

Now compatible with Newsletter’s free SMTP add-on.
Verified compatibility with PHP 7.4

Version 2.2

Verifed compatibility with WP 5.6 and Newsletter 7.0.1.
Fixed PHP warnings.

Version 2.1

Display a warning if another plugin has replaced the wp_mail() function.

Version 2.0

Optional automatic generation for newsletters. Manual generation also still supported.
Optional automatic generation for transactional emails.
Improved plain text look.

Version 1.0

Beta period finished. No code changes since 0.4.

Version 0.4

Initial version. Please provide feedback on the Support forum.