[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 385, entitled revolutionizing newsletters: Xaver Birsak's journey with his Mailster plugin. It was published on Thursday, the 15th of August, 2024.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, as I said at the top of the show, it's Xaver Birsak. We're talking today about Mailster.
Now Mailster is a plugin that you can install in your WordPress website and it enables you to send all sorts of really sophisticated emails. So think of something like Mailchimp and the builder that they've got there.
Think of the fact that you can segment audiences, you can send out drip content, you could send out automated content when episodes like podcasts or posts that you put on your blog are sent out. It really is a fantastic solution. And a complete rival to all sorts of SaaS platforms that do a similar thing.
So in today's conversation, we discover how it all got started and how Xaver started with Envato. We then talk about the capabilities of Mailster, how it handles sending out emails and how many it can send.
We talk about the pitfalls of things like Gmail and how you figure out what gets sent to your spam folder.
Data protection and compliance is also under inspection, but also we talk about the new features, which are going to be coming to Mailster in the future.
It's all coming up on the podcast and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Xaver Birsak. How you doing Xaver?
[00:04:54] Xaver Birsak: Hi Nathan. I'm fine. Thanks so for having me.
[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Xaver and I actually, didn't know each other until a little while ago When I was at Word Camp Asia. Xaver was at Word Camp Asia, and I don't remember if we bumped into each other in the hall or if we, bumped into each other at the walk that, that we both went on after the event.
[00:05:17] Xaver Birsak: Was the work. Leslie Sim did this, organized it and there we met the first time. Yeah.
[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: We went on a walk, which was supposed to be mostly horizontal, and it was anything other than horizontal. It was quite a story. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, e enough of that. Um, but Xaver and I ended up talking and it turned out that the, product that Xaver builds, which is called Male Star. is a product that I've used.
And so that was really nice because it, is quite often the case that I'll interview people and really I'm learning, on the conversation about what the product does. But in, in your case, I think I've got a fairly good intuition about how it works. But I won't steal your thunder. You can get to describe it.
Dear listener, maybe the first thing to do is to go to Saver's website. It's called mailer.co, so M-A-I-L-S-T-E r.co, CO. Go there, check out the, the product, then come back and you'll be fully familiar with what's going on as well. But a little bit background about you, Xaver. Do you just want to spend a moment or two telling us a little bit about yourself, where you live, how long you've been working in tech and WordPress.
[00:06:30] Xaver Birsak: yeah, I'm from Austria. I am in tech. I would say about, lemme count about 20 years now when we start, I, I started with Flash, actually it was in the early 2002 years or something. So I started with Flash and then I, h tm l JavaScript and all this stuff. And I had a small agency in 2006. And I did what everyone was doing, like building, websites for local clients and did everything from print and even 3D animations.
and at some point I, I like to focus on HT TM L stuff. And in 2009 or 10, I found, the Envato marketplaces, especially theme forest. And I was looking around, things, what I can do there to get some, passive income. That was the idea. And then I stumbled upon. email templates and I thought, okay, they look pretty basic and in terms of, how they are built, and I can do that.
So as I, I did my first email template and I got rejected twice, and then I did, do it again and. In the end of 2010 or January, 2011, I released my first item on the Invato marketplace, which was theme forest. And I expected to have, a monthly income of $400. which helped me to build my agency.
and in the first months I got $800
[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:08:30] Xaver Birsak: on. It was like, okay, this works. And so I keep releasing email templates and other stuff, and it went really well. it was the, I call it the wild west back then when everything wasn't regulated and there was not that many competition there. And for a good year.
So I did email templates and also admin skin. and. In 2012, I was thinking about how to market my email templates more, and then I came to the idea, a tool where people can use my email templates to send out a. Newsletters. So MailChimp was, big at the time already, and I know it, and my templates were, you can use them with, MailChimp, but I, thought I could build my own tool and WordPress was, was on my radar and I. Basically you choose WordPress because of the market share, and also Invato was really focusing on WordPress back then. So this is, was the time when I built my first plugin ever for WordPress, and it was mail, it wasn't mailed back then. we had a naming switch at some time. but in 2012, I released the very first version of my mail back then.
So it was ster now, but it was my mail back then. And yeah, and it was really, I got really good feedback and I, shipped new versions and I bring, I brought new features and I iterated, often. And yeah, it took off pretty well on the Martin marketplace. And so fast forward to 2016 when I, went to my very first world Camp Europe in Vienna.
I, I partnered up with a guy from Vienna and he then we decided to change the name because of legal reasons within American company and so on. And, this, partnership didn't went out well. So we split it up again in 2019 or so, and then I was on my own again. and then I started to adopt things or, To make it GDPR compliance for the user and incorporate the new stuff, new, add-ons, new templates. And now we are at version 4.0, which was released, about a, month ago. And in last year in March, I moved away from Invado. Because the sales were declining and also the, focus on the marketplaces were shifted a little bit.
And so I decided to go to a different vendor to, to sell my product, and go to a subscription based model. So you, you, I get the recurring, income and it was a good decision after all.
[00:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: that is quite a story actually. There's a, there's an awful lot in there. A few things to unpack. Firstly, bravo for pulling this off. It, you've. You've built something which is incredibly complicated. I don't mean complicated to use. it's complicated from your perspective. there's an awful lot of moving pieces and it's really well done.
and I did, I was using it when it was my mail. I remember that. I remember your logo and I was using it. And I also remember the transition when you of, I, I guess you must have emailed or something to say that, we're
[00:12:34] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, it was a, yeah, it was a little bit tough thing because I like to rename all variables internally and database
[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? You went
[00:12:44] Xaver Birsak: yeah, I went.
[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but I was using it, absolutely blown away. I've gotta say the Invato marketplace, theme, forest Code Canyon and all that. It was really popular back then, wasn't it? I feel like the shiners. Gone off that a little bit. I don't even know if that marketplace is still popular or productive for the people in it.
But you obviously decided to move away. It's quite a brave decision, but it seems like it's worked. I believe when I bought it, the options in that were available where you paid once you just paid this one fee and you've got this lifetime deal and obviously that's not really sustainable.
Anybody
[00:13:24] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, exactly. that's good for the, buyers, but not for the authors. And also actually not good for the buyers because if you. If you don't spend much money on the product, you may get any support for the product anymore, or it will just vanish. And so many big brands, left Invado. So I think that's a huge, topic for another session.
[00:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, we can go into all of that, but anyway, congratulations for keeping it going for what is really now a very long time. I'm just gonna try and describe what it does and basically it does the job of a SaaS. So if you imagine like something like MailChimp, I. But inside of WordPress, a plugin that you own and you run inside of your WordPress website.
It's really on that scale. it'll, you can create, you can create your emails with something akin to block functionality, but this was way before there was the block editor, but you could drag in. In a page builder style, and again, before a lot of the page builders came along, but that very similar experience.
you've got images of what the little bits of your template look like and you drag those in and they then sit inside of your template. You can move them around. You can obviously interact and adapt the text and all of that. And then once you've sent it, it will give you. Everything that you expect in terms of, a analytics, how many opens, where were the opens, when did they open, and all of that.
And it, it all happens inside a side. WordPress. So you know, you're owning your own data. That's nice. You're not having to pay for a third party subscription. And then it'll connect with a bunch of, email services, because we all know it's not a good idea to send email from your own server that's gonna end in disaster.
And I think the one that I chose back in the day was Amazon, SES, which is Amazon's simple email service. It was trivially easy, you set it up on the Amazon side, and then you connect the bits and pieces in mailer and you're off to the races. It just works. So it, really does. Offer that Salike feel.
And I've gotta say, if you were building something like that and this was your more or less first shot at something, that's pretty impressive. Xaver.
[00:15:48] Xaver Birsak: Yeah. Thank you. there's also a problem I have that is, was so successful because people say, if you. if you like to get successful, you have to build, 10 things and nine of them fail. So my very first one basically, was a win already. So the next nine one will fail. So I'm a little bit afraid to, start a new big thing.
maybe it's, that's the reason, or I'm just lazy. I don't know.
[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: I, guess anybody's gonna tell you that the first nine things will fail because I. They've had the experience of the first nine things failing. And of course, when you hit on the one, that's the success. Stop there for a bit. you're not gonna say, oh, this is a brilliant success, now I need some failure.
No, yeah, Is it just you though, is it you that basically carries the can for this, or do
[00:16:45] Xaver Birsak: yes, I, hired some support agent a while back, in 2019, which really helped me to get away from support from doing support. I still jump in on very technical questions and very specific ones, so I still jump in on them. And then, when a major release is there, then I constantly monitor support requests.
So I get, quickly on, I. Eventual problems with a very new feature or thought, then I'm still back in support. But I usually, my, my day job is not doing support anymore. It's really helps me focusing on other things where I'm good at it, like developing or where I'm embedded it, like marketing. But I, it's hard to find good people, and I don't wanna throw money at something where I don't know what's, what's the outcome.
[00:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: have, I have a friend who has a, a successful plugin and he says that if you have a successful plugin and you are doing it by yourself, he said by year three, I. You are running a support business. it basically, the support ends up being what you do with your day because, there's thousands of customers and they've all got questions and things, unexpectedly arise or, there's some plug in conflict or
something.
[00:18:08] Xaver Birsak: that's why, I like to, I, I did a documentation site where I tried to put everything which come up more than once. Into a documentation I also built in, within the plugin. A little question mark you can find all around, the plugin, which you just click and then you can get help, in the plugin, which helps to reduce support requests.
So our support requests are most of time very specific. or people are just didn't check out the docs
[00:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You're always gonna get that people are, it's easier to write an email than it is to read the
[00:18:52] Xaver Birsak: it's.
[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah, that's the way it goes. So why would you, want to do this as a plugin as opposed to. sas, you can go to MailChimp, you can pay your subscription over there, and that's all taken care of.
are there any sort of high level reasons why having this inside of a WordPress website is a good idea?
[00:19:16] Xaver Birsak: Yes, of course, because, many of my customers have, data concerns. So the, second biggest audience of my customers are Germans. I. because they, and also Austrians are very constant when it comes to data protection. they really like to push this GDPR thing to the max and really like to have to own their data.
And they know with mail so you can store everything. Within your WordPress setup. So of course if you store, if you have your website hosted on a US company, on a US server, the data will be there as well. But usually, Germans especially, Try to host them within the European Union, which makes it much easier to be GDPR compliant because you, there is this, safe harbor agreement, which is now no longer something, there's something coming up.
So when GDPR, was a thing in 2018, many people, came over from MailChimp because they have no, no idea how MailChimp handles their data. They were all stored on a US service, and they were looking for alternatives and was a solution for them. I have an importer for MailChimp, so you can import your, contacts from MailChimp pretty easily with all the data they have, but you have, you of course, have to do the automations again, and you have to build up your campaigns again.
But in terms of data storage, many people prefer that it is all inside WordPress.
[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so are they. okay, so we're talking about subscribers. Imagine you've got an email list with 10,000 people on it. if you are running MailChimp, they are. They're somewhere I. That MailChimp's infrastructure is who, knows where. but if they, if you've got a, let's say a German customer and they've paid for a German hosting company and they know that server is located inside the boundaries of Germany, then you know that's inside your.
Your WordPress database. And you take on the responsibility of that, but also you don't have to worry about the, the fact that it's sitting somewhere else. Are the, is the data about subscribers, are they just WordPress users or do you have a separate, table somewhere that you store all of that?
[00:21:56] Xaver Birsak: Exactly. There's, they're, separated, which makes it easier to not pollute your user database. Some customers of mine have, thousands of subscribers in their database. even millions, some of them. So if there were, workplace users, they all have access to your WordPress site. At some point or somehow maybe they're just a subscriber role, but they all have this, access to your worker site.
And, so I decided to have my own table of subscribers, but they are connected. If they are, is a WordPress user with the same email. They are connected and mails that treat them like, they are well pursued. So can, you can do some segmentations on. Editors or subscribers. Or contributors, or the other role is admins, for instance.
So you can do that because the, subscribers and the workplace users are connected. If there are, the same users with the same email address,
[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: Does the, plugin, so obviously we've said that it connects to a bunch of different, mail services and we can go into what they are in a minute. yeah. does the plugin then, connect and send like batches of emails? So let's say I've got a list of, again, 10, 10,000 people, something like that.
When I click go or send or whatever it may be in MailChimp, I'm just, I forget about it. I'm just assuming it's gonna work. But on the mail side, presumably my server is now beginning to take action and do things on my behalf. And I'm guessing if it tried to send out 10,000 emails. in quick succession things are gonna go wrong, especially on more modest hosting.
So how do you break that batch up of jobs? Do you start, I dunno, do you do 10 and then wait a few seconds, then 10 more. Just let us know what goes on.
[00:23:55] Xaver Birsak: yes, you have a queue, so everything, what, what, should be sent in ster, get queued first, and then there's a dedicated process which handles the queue. And you can put in 10,000, emails in this queue and no problem. But it takes some time. And, how long it takes depends on your server and your settings.
I have a, feature which is called, lemme look it up a quick, it's called, automatic, number of emails sent. I, don't have a real good name for that, but basically, the process checks how many emails can be sent in a certain amount of time, which you decide, and then it tries to make, sent more and suddenly when it breaks.
Then it reduces again, so it gets the perfect value. in general, I always say two to three emails per second, depending on your server, but that's the, that's a reasonable, amount of emails you can send.
[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you'll go through, you'll go through a list pretty quickly. I seem to remember that in Amazon settings, after you've been, sending emails for a period of time, they, allow that rate to rise. I believe it was like something like 28 per second when I opened the account and then they bumped it up for me to I dunno, a hundred per second or something like that.
[00:25:21] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, tech technically it's, that, that amount of emails, but you have always this, this, bottleneck of, your server to the Amazon server. So always recommend to use a Amazon server close to your. Web server and they have plenty, across the globe in the UK and US all around the world.
They have servers, which do the emails delivery. And if, your web server and the Amazon server is close by the, than the throughput of emails is of course much higher, but it's not about sending out, one or two emails per second or 10 emails per second. It's more like. It depends on how many, emails you have.
If you have 10,000 emails, that's not a thing. you, they're sent out in a couple of minutes, so it's, it doesn't matter if you, if they're sent in five minutes or 15 minutes, it's just, it's, yeah. It's vanity.
[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So long as they go out, it's, whether one goes out 10 minutes after
[00:26:27] Xaver Birsak: People try to push it as quickly as possible, but it doesn't matter if the, email arrives at nine or at nine 10. Inbox of your users. And also there's, an option that, that you can send a time zone based, sendings. if you know the time zone of the subscriber, ster can handle that, that all of them get the email at their local time.
So if you, like to get them, at nine in the morning. But if they're located in New York or in Singapore, they all get them in at nine in the morning. So if you have the time zone, you can incorporate this and this makes it even, it's not required to send so quickly because you maybe send only 10 emails at this hour and in the next hour you send, 200 emails.
So it's not that much anymore.
[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: I understand. Yeah. I guess there's quite a lot going on with the server as well, because let's say for example, I'm batching and I've got this 10,000 email list to send out to, and it begins, the process begins and the first thousand have gone out. There's also. The, tracking of the thousand that have gone out, that presumably is coming back to my website.
So somebody's opened an email, clicked on a link, you've somehow got to write the data that link got clicked. So you're sending and receiving all at the same
[00:27:52] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, it's, yeah, it's tracking. It's just clicks, which are re via your website. So even if you have outbound clicks, still. Hit your own server, but it's usually, I, have about 10,000 active users I send regularly and there is basically no impact on my, server. and I have a very cheap droplet on digital ocean, so
I think it's second expensive.
It's. $16 per month droplet, or $14 per month droplet. So there is no, and I even have, sites with the lowest here, like $6 or $7 per month, for a droplet. And there is no impact in terms of, loading performance as far as a node. So
[00:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's really interesting.
[00:28:41] Xaver Birsak: you have millions of subscribers or thousands and multiple of thousands, you may get an impact, of course, but I'm, not sure if mails is good for you.
If you have thousands, 10 thousands, a hundred thousands, or even million of subscribers because you, then you should go to an enterprise solution. And I'm not focusing on this kind of users because it's just everything's getting slower. you, if you run, subscribers queries with conditions, and you have a lot of conditions in mailer.
it's getting hard to calculate all of the data because it's just, the regular, MySQL database in the background. So maybe should consider a different solution if you
millions or thousands or hundred thousands of subscribers.
[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: that makes sense. You mentioned, segmentation and one obvious segment. There might be the, geographical location, but can you, do other kind of automations and segmentations? I know that you can, but I just c can you give us a few examples of the kind of things that you can automate with this or ways that you can segment it and then automate it?
[00:29:53] Xaver Birsak: In general, you can send every transactional email from verus as well. So if you like to send the, password resets email or WooCommerce order confirmation, you can either. Don't handle them at all. At all. Or you can just wrap the mailer templates around the content. So you use the, any sending method you're already using, but just use the mailer template around, or you use mailer delivery methods to send all your WP Mail, emails out, like WooCommerce stuff.
And and, email resets. And That's what, so mails can handle any email from your site, but, what, was the question? yeah, automations, some of the things that you can do.
automations. You can, I was 4.0, which was released last month. I introduced new automations with customer journeys. So where you have a kind of trigger and then run a journal with okay, if someone signs up, then send a welcome email, then wait a day and send the second email.
You know what you, see these kind of builders, on other SaaS, services. And, you can do this now in, in Mel as well. And there are several kind of triggers. For instance, list signup forms, submission, if, if a custom feel of a subscriber changed, if a tag is added or removed, if, is, if a certain page is visited from a subscriber, you can trigger some automation and you can even decide.
If, if certain conditions happen. So if, for instance, if someone signs up and has a first name of John. Then run automation. I don't know
that yeah. That's great though. I love it.
with conditions. and yeah, and since it's only pretty, it's pretty new, the automation system since a month now. I try to evolve it.
I, already have plans for 4.1, which should be released in May for new features and. You, can do birthday campaigns like, you have the birthday from a subscriber and you send them once a year with some offset. So if you like to send it a day in advance or one day later, which doesn't make sense, a birthday greeting for a special discount so you can set it up and basically forget. You shouldn't forget your automations, but you can set it up and forget it, and it runs in the background and you get the stats as well. So like how many people got this campaign and how many opened it and so on.
[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: The, thing that I used it for, and I guess you would have this, I suppose it's not really an automation, but I use. It because I'm using WordPress and I wanted to send the content of a post out in the email, and my recollection was that you, you build a template that you're happy, you give it a header.
In my case, you put the WP Builds logo in there and maybe add some other menu items or whatever it may be, and then you drop in. What I'm gonna call is a short code for the content. And then every time that I would send out a post that would automatically, the post itself, the content of the post would get wrapped in the email template that I created.
And I, you just didn't have to think about it. You just knew that your subscriber list, which was growing or shrinking or things were getting bounced and then somebody was sent to, don't center them, they're bouncing and all of that kind of stuff. it would just happen so.
Actually as a WordPress user, for me, that was the most credible bit. That was the bit that I was hooked into because I wanted to send my content. dear listener, you're probably a WordPress user if you've got the inclination that you wanna send out. content that you are creating and you don't wanna think about it.
You don't wanna copy and paste that content, send over to MailChimp, paste it over there, off you go. You just hit publish in WordPress and it's done. So that was the use that I put it to, and it was great.
[00:34:17] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, sending a latest post is, is a feature which is there for 7, 8, 9 years at, since the very first, very beginning of the plugin, because it's so naturally to have access to the post of the same page that's, that's, also, MailChimp or others can just rely on RSS feeds. And as we all know, RSS feeds are not that flexible, like having access to the actual data on the same database.
ster can use RSS if you have different sites and like to use RSS feed, for instance. I have a case where they send, the latest three RSS feeds from New York Times. Every time three, are released as every time new three new RCS items are released, which happens quite often. On, New York Times, an email will be sent.
So this is possible
[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so that's consuming an RSS feed from somewhere else and then
[00:35:19] Xaver Birsak: From somewhere. Yeah, of course you can use the same thess fit from the same side, but this doesn't make sense of course, because you have the data in the post table. But you can use any other RSS feed to do some automations like,
[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the, way that I worked it as well is, and again, just to describe the interface a little bit, imagine like a page builder or the block editor, you drag in okay, the fe, the, title drag in that, and you've now got the title in your email. And then you can drag in an image and you can say, okay.
The featured image goes there, and then you know you want a bit of text underneath that and you want a button, so you're dragging a button and you tell it, okay, the button should go to the URL or whatever, and you set that template up, save it, and then connect it to the, when a post is published trigger
[00:36:08] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:09] Nathan Wrigley: and you're off to the races.
Yeah.
[00:36:11] Xaver Birsak: Yeah.
You, in mail, so you have, your email templates are, modules. I call it modules because block wasn't a thing back then. So there are modules and each model can have, reference to a post and that's not, a certain post, but also some relative post.
insert the latest post or insert the second latest post from this category. At the time when the email is sent, and then you have to decide when the email actually gets sent. So if you insert the last, is the second last and the third last post and sent the email. Every time three posts have been published, you get the, exact, the content you need.
Every three posts, not on every post, but on every three
[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: Every time a third or, I guess you could just say, I don't know. just let's go Friday, two o'clock. Every Friday, two o'clock.
[00:37:10] Xaver Birsak: a different kind of, automation,
but you can say, send it every Friday and con, and include every post which has been released up to three or how you set it
[00:37:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, So you'd have the, main one, the latest one, and then underneath that, maybe a bit smaller or something like that in a, little grid or, with a bunch of columns. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:30] Xaver Birsak: prefer most of the time. So to get a newsletter every, week or every month, but then you have to, do a post also. So there's some content.
[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Otherwise you
send the
[00:37:42] Xaver Birsak: maybe better to, say, okay, when I, hit the third post, a newsletter is sent and you can cancel it of course, because you have to say, yeah, send it.
Not right away, but send it in an hour after the third post is published.
[00:38:00] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously if you've got a website where you are creating content, this is just, this is a no brainer, isn't it? If you've got an email list and you won't wanna send out your WordPress content, this will work. so you can, there's all of those different options and we've, really barely touched the surface.
You could, I'm sure, drill really deep down into all of this, but, so it'll send regular WordPress emails, it'll send your bespoke emails. It can send both if you want. At the same time there's a load of automations. You can get templates. So obviously that was something that you mentioned at the beginning.
You don't have to design from scratch. You can, either purchase or there's a bunch of free templates where you can
just drop 'em in.
[00:38:38] Xaver Birsak: Yeah. As well. And I'm planning to, do more. I have now plans. It wasn't possible in Novato. I have now, different plans and with the, with some plans, you get more templates you can use.
[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. But you can just roll your own, you can just start from scratch and with a blank canvas, and then you just save those templates somewhere. It's, if you're a WordPress user and you know your way around WordPress, this, whole templating
[00:39:03] Xaver Birsak: email templates. Email html is a little bit harder or different than other templates, so it's not easy like a page builder and you get the H TM L and use it as email because it doesn't work. So e with email templates, e email, HTML, it's, we're still in the nineties with tables with a lot of tables.
[00:39:23] Nathan Wrigley: Actually, I remember, using your templates and just clicking the HTML button and looking at what was in there as a guide to, for me to understand what was allowed and what wasn't allowed, and, how you'd got your tables set out and all of that kind of stuff, and you could just drop your own content in,
[00:39:43] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, you can also use the HML and use it somewhere else. It's also works because you don't, you, don't have this, the, possible, the, way you can edit it. It's not possible on other builders, of course, but you can use the layout to use it somewhere else. That's, it should
[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so the services that you send from, and this may not be entirely everything, but I'll read out the ones, and if you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure you've heard of these, SendGrid. mail Jet, AWS, so SES, I'm guessing. spark post mail, ascend Mail, gone, and also Gmail. Curiously, I guess that's for those of you that are sending, less than 200 a day or something.
[00:40:29] Xaver Birsak: don't recommend it. but it was a huge demand on using Gmail. So build an add-on for it.
[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess if you're just sending like a handful, right?
[00:40:38] Xaver Birsak: Yeah. Gmail is very strict, in terms of sending Mass Box sending, so I don't recommend it really. I really recommend Amazon. SES they're really cheap.
[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: It is ridiculously cheap. Honestly, I'm gonna make up a number, but I think it's about what one US sent per thousand emails or something like that.
[00:40:59] Xaver Birsak: it's, yeah, it's that. No, It wa wait. It's $1, one US dollar for 10,000 emails. So
[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Whatever that works out to. Yeah.
[00:41:08] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, it was still cheap. I pay about two, $3 per month
[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:41:14] Xaver Birsak: Let's like, not even worth to, all the accounting for
[00:41:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It is. It is amazing. And the
[00:41:20] Xaver Birsak: The others are good as well, so every, if you prefer a different company, you can, many of them have free plans, which I don't recommend because you're in a shared pool, in shared IP pool, which were also some spam or, and maybe, have the same IP address and they get blocked and so it's better to pay a little bit and be safe instead of going for free.
[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:41:44] Xaver Birsak: don't send via your own server because they're supposed to be used as an email bulk email sender. It all, depends. Then if you have only a couple of subscribers, I have some users which only have 50, 60 subscribers, and, just like to keep them updated. You can of course go with your, regular web posts server.
But if you go the thousands and send regularly, you, may facing problems with Gmail and Yahoo.
[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Then there's a bunch of add-ons as well just to cement the deal. Maybe, if you are, I don't know, you might have a form plugin, for example, that you are using, and wouldn't it be handy if you could take the. What was consumed by that form and then plug it into to mailer. I'm just looking the pages, mailer.co/ add-ons, all as one word.
And, I can see here just right off the bat, gravity forms, WS form. you've obviously got a connection to MailChimp. You mentioned that, AR forms. And a whole bunch of other things like Ninja popups, which was a thing back in the day. loads and loads of different options. Some of it connected to membership sites like Member Press.
Some of it connected to selling products like Easy Digital Downloads. Yeah, there's absolutely loads in there. So you've spent a lot of time integrating with the wider ecosystem so that it's not just this silo.
[00:43:12] Xaver Birsak: it's important to have a lot of connections or a lot of integration, which is, is a, opportunity for partnerships or some kind of partnerships, which helps both of us. So for the, for instance, WP WS forms, is really, good form builder plugin, and you can even do more, much more than my form builder built for WordPress, built for mailer can do because I have just a popup kind of form builder.
With WWS forms, you can build so much more and do conditional checks and so on. And if you like to use it or already use it, you can just, connect them. So I also like to have them as, subscribers and I just enable extension and, do some settings stuff and then you're ready to go.
[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you could, you got the name and email field, but then of course you could have as many other fields as you wanted because it's a form plugin. It's, that's what it's, it's doing what it does well. It's, got loads of other fields like, I don't know, uploading images or. Whatever files or other conditional logic going on there, and it will integrate with those as well.
as of this moment and caveat mTOR, dear listener, this may change. Obviously it's up to Xaver, what he wants to do with this, but the pricing is as follows. If you want to, just, have it on the one site. Then, it's $79, per year. And there are some caveats around that, like the number of automations and things like that.
You can, go up, for $99 a year and you get more automations and more pre-checks and all of that kind of stuff. And then there's an agency option, which is 1 99. This is US dollars, per year, but it's all on, as you'd expect. Mail star.co/pricing. You can check it. Out there. I think if we're up in the 40 minute mark, we've probably got about what we want to out of that particular episode.
Um, Xaver, is there anything you think we missed, or if not, do you just wanna drop a, do you not wanna drop some sort of Twitter handle or email address or, I, no, don't do that. or something else where people can find you if they want to talk to you about mail stuff.
[00:45:35] Xaver Birsak: Yeah, I'm usually on Twitter. My. and a lot of things are still missing, but we cannot, come, we cannot do this at all because it's so much. It's, it's a, it's an old plugin. It's it's about 11 years old now. So a lot have changed and a lot have been added and a lot of features there. But if anyone wants to reach out, just tweet is the perfect place, to say hi.
And my dms are open.
[00:46:08] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:46:09] Xaver Birsak: If you.
[00:46:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. Well, Xaver really enjoyed chatting to you today. Bravo for building such an impressive, I'm gonna say SaaS product inside of a plugin. It's amazing. And if you haven't heard of it before, which you know may be the case, go check it out. But if you've heard a it before and you haven't looked at it recently, go check it out as well because sounds like.
Version four was a pretty big update, version 4.1, dropping in May. That sounds like a nice update as well. So have a nice day. Thanks for chatting to me on the podcast.
Okay, that is all I've got for you this week.
I hope that you enjoyed that. If you've got any commentary on that head to WP Builds.com, search for episode number 385, and leave us a comment there. We would really appreciate it.
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