Postalion went live on WordPress.org on 8 October as version 1.0. Sixteen days later it is at 1.7.4. That is thirteen updates, five of them on a single day. Here is what changed, and why.
What people asked for
The Pro waiting list on the Postalion site asks one question: what would you pay for? Seven people answered in the first two weeks. Most of them ticked the same three things: a drag-and-drop email builder, email sequences, and segments by behaviour. A/B tests, WooCommerce emails and priority support came next. One person wanted the builder to work inside Elementor, and one asked for digests by category.
The first three are Pro features, and Pro is being built for November. Everything a site needs to run a list properly went into the free plugin instead.
What went into the free plugin
- Sending through a mail service (1.2). An SMTP server or a sending service is set up in Settings, with a button that tries the values before you save them. The same server can carry all the mail of the site, not only newsletters.
- Moving in from another plugin (1.2 and 1.5). Subscribers, lists and statuses come over from MailPoet or from The Newsletter Plugin, in batches, without changing anything in the old plugin.
- Knowing who is on the list (1.4). Tags such as “customer” or “webinar 2026”, and custom fields such as company, city or birthday, which an email can use as
{company}. With WooCommerce, a paid order tags the buyer as a customer. Nobody is subscribed by a purchase. - A digest of new posts (1.3, and 1.5 for categories). Every day, week or month, the posts published since the last digest go out as one newsletter, limited to the categories or tags you choose if you want. When there is nothing new, nothing is sent.
- Readers in charge of their own subscription (1.3 and 1.6). Every email links to a preferences page where a reader changes their details and lists instead of leaving altogether, and to a web version of the newsletter. A shortcode lists past newsletters as a public archive.
- A second chance (1.6). With statistics on, a sent newsletter can be resent, with a new subject line, only to the people who did not open it.
- More places to sign up (1.3 and 1.5). Checkboxes in WPForms, Fluent Forms and Elementor Pro forms, and the form as a native element in Elementor, Beaver Builder, Bricks and Divi.
- Three more templates (1.7): Programme for venues and courses, Shop for products and prices, and School for schools, parishes and associations. Eight in all.
- A Romanian translation (1.5), shipped with the plugin.
The day with five releases
On 24 October, 1.7.0 went out in the morning. Four fixes followed the same day, and they came from putting Postalion to work on this site, behind Cloudflare, with real people signing up:
- Someone with an account on the site who signed up through a form was told to check their inbox, but nothing was sent and they were not added to the list (1.7.1).
- Browser autofill could fill in the hidden anti-spam field, so a real sign-up was quietly treated as spam (1.7.1 and 1.7.2).
- Behind Cloudflare, the limit of ten sign-ups an hour per visitor counted Cloudflare’s addresses instead of the visitors’, so many people shared one limit (1.7.2).
- The confirmation email was cut off on phones, and long links widened newsletters (1.7.3 and 1.7.4).
None of these had shown up before. They showed up the first time the plugin met a real site and real readers.
What comes next
Pro arrives in November, with the builder, the sequences and the segments people asked for; the details are on the Postalion site. The free plugin keeps getting updates, and nothing in it will move behind a price.
Updates arrive in Plugins like for any other plugin. If something you need is missing, write to me at hi@fantasythemes.net.