Email Subscriptions
There are many ways of reading WordPress.com blogs and we’ve now added another: blog subscriptions.
This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.
If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.
All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.
HTML formatting will be used in emails, where possible, to retain the flavor of your post. This includes your images, making for attractive email photo galleries. Subscribers can also choose to receive emails in plain text, should they not have access to an HTML enabled mail client.
You can select to have an email sent each time a post is made, or to receive a daily or weekly digest of all the posts. Perfect for catching up on your reading at the weekend.
Want to keep up-to-date with all the latest WordPress.com developments? Subscribe to this very blog and get all future announcements delivered to your inbox. It really does only take a few seconds and you’ll find the form just after this text. Want to keep up-to-date without using email? Have posts sent direct to your Jabber-supporting instant messenger client, or try Readomattic to keep a list of your favourites. Remember that you can also subscribe to an individual post by checking the ‘notify me of follow-up comments via email’ when making a comment.
We’ve got a lot more plans for email so stay tuned!
Full details of the subscription feature can be found on the subscriptions support page.
- November 25, 2009
- New Features
WordPress.com News 
i will put the widget
thanks.
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Thanks!!! Now I’ll use WordPress’s own Subscribe Widget!!!
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I can’t find the option to add this widget to my blog… HELP!! Where is the button to put it in my blog? 😥
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You can add it from the Appearance > Widgets page in your WordPress.com blog. See the blog subscription widget support page for details.
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I like it 🙂
thanks
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I wish it was a co-user subscription thing like most people do rather than emailed updates.
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Was long overdue, but thank you for the hard work. Will this be available on regular wordpress blogs (standalones)?
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Just what I was hoping for. Thanks!
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It sends email on backdated posts, is there a check box to block email if we’re making a back-dated post?
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Really good ! Thanks
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I love this new feature!
Keep them coming please.
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This is a great feature! But is there a way to customize how the posts show in the email? For instance, I don’t like how is shows the full article that isn’t always formatted correctly (depending on the subscribers email provider). Is there a way to just show an excerpt in the email with a “Click here to continue reading” type link that will take people to the actual blog post?
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We will be adding more control over what gets sent out. The emails should display correctly for everyone, so if you have an example of this not happening please can you contact support and pass along the details?
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Works fine – thanks 😀
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Just noticed that the email is posting the shortcode of the youtube instead of posting the youtube video or the plain URL.
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@ismailimail, this should already be fixed. Please let us know in support if you are still having any trouble.
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Sounds great!
As someone who posts pieces of fiction mixed in with regular real-life blogging, though, the ability to only push posts marked with certain tags would be ideal. I’m sure there’ll be features coming to this quickly, though.
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Hm, I have a question, can you make the same function for comments? Can you make subscription with just one click for ALL new comments of some blog, not just for a single post?
Tnx in advance.
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Thanks for this great tool.
Looking forward to next version which takes into account Stuart’s and Calvin’s suggestions 🙂
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Is there a way to add these subscriptions as a post so that people can read your post and subscribe from there?
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Currently, you need to use the blog subscription widget, but we’re looking at adding a way to allow subscriptions from inside posts in the future.
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thanks
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Hi, that’s a great feature. One thing which would be very useful is to be able to upload a list, or ping a single e-mail address (from my own script) onto the mailing list.
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While a useful feature this would be too prone to abuse.
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@ John this is the link non wordpress users get when they subscribe to my blog http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=subscriptions%5Bsnip%5D
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They will only get this link if they have a wordpress.com account. If they don’t then they will get a different link
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This is just in time
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Sweet, keep up the good work!
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I can’t see which emailadresses subscribed and the subscribers get to read the entire post in their mail, so they don’t have to actually visit the blog anymore. So I deleted the widget again. But now is the question: how do I delete my subscribers?
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Seems Good
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how to move EASILY feedblitz subscribers over to this new email subscriptions service?
is there any way to send an “invite” to non-wordpress users that doesn’t require creating a wordpress account?
or a way to just sign up everyone (even if they have to confirm their subscription)
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There isn’t a way to move subscribers. You can continue to use bot services, or you can ask your subscribers to sign up using the subscription form on your blog.
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A very neat feature. I’d love to subscribe to certain tags on a website. A future feature I hope.
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There isn’t an option to subscribe to a tag via email, but you can subscribe to tags using Readomattic in your blog dashboard.
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lovely feature
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Another great addition, I welcome it!!!
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Nice feature… but at this time I’ll stick with my feedburner.
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Great! Had been waiting for this….
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It’s quite good to know one can blog with ease, it’s always nice to know that at last restaurant managers in now have a somewhere they can rely on for news, materials and further education.
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done and done…
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I can see the appeal for email subscriptions, but I would prefer that the subscriber receive only a link to the post. That’s because I sometimes edit a post after publication (I’m a perfectionist about my writing and posts, which read like op-eds or columns). So, I’d prefer not to send them actual text.
So, I’m sticking with subscriptions by readers, eg Google Reader.
That said, WordPress has been an awesome blogging platform. I find the interface very smooth-running. (I briefly tried Blogger before, but found the image upload process very clumsy.)
Many thanks,
YogaSpy
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John about a subcription where you can send a “custom message” in your email, rather than a blog post?
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We are looking at this feature.
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hey hey you..
may I join with U ?
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This is a great look for the entire wordpress.com blogging community
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** Is this compliant with the Can Spam Act of 2003? **
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Email subscription is a great addition to WordPress.com as many less experienced computer users find RSS and even Feedburner email subscription a bit daunting.
Category based email subscription (similar to that currently available for RSS feeds) would be a major advantage if it could also effectively allow me to control which posts are available for email. Similarly I could see big advantages in readers having the ability to subscribe to particular Categories.
Excerpt only posts with Read more link would be another big plus. In particular this could make real sense for weekly digests.
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thanks alot brother,
this was very useful and easy.
i pray that you and your staff get all good both in this world and the Hereafter ameen.
take care
peace be with you
maryam
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Thanks for this feature, I have been waiting for it and will definitely use. For those who are concerned about using it because you may change or edit posts after you publish it, but the email was already sent, I would re-iterate some above comments by saying RSS and Feedburner subscriptions by email do the same exact thing. If people are going to subscribe to your blog via RSS you might as well offer the option to subscribe via email.
That’s just my 2 cents ^_^
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There is one aspect of this that I can’t find any comments (thusfar) on.
In the UK it does not generally go down to start an email with “Howdy!” It plays out as unprofessional and over-familiar. Given that context is there any way a feature can be added to the widget to ensure that blog owners can tweak at least some of the wording within the email that is sent out?
Thanks.
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How long has this been a feature for? Just wondering in what period of time I accumulated the amount of subscriptions I have…
Also, what’s the difference between a subscriber and a subscription? The number is different on my blog.
How is this feature linked to the Blog Surfer tab?
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Email subscriptions for blogs is new, but comment subscriptions for posts have been available on WordPress.com since January 2009. A subscriber can have many comment subscriptions to various posts on your blog.
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Yea! Already using it.
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Great news, started using it! Thanks a lot team.
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Love it!!!
I set this up today and my blog posts look 100% better in the email than they did with feedburner. I also am glad to see this feature since I had a problem before of feedburner sending out old posts from last year again.
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Great feature, especially for newer bloggers that may not have set up Feedburner yet, thanks!
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finally. i was long waiting for this feature. thanks.
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WordPress is great.I declare this month my blog posting month.Will I be able to release a thank you document to my subscribers or comment post as they press submit? Do we need other website with such advanced wordpress sites?
Keep it up WordPress team.
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i felt.. is good.. 🙂 thanks..
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Have to try this. Sounds excellent !
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Thanks!
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my readers will be happy they have been asking me to put out a newsletter… this will help
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I agree with Mr. Calvin when he said that: One comment though – close to what Stuart has already said: e-mail subscribers seem to get the full post, which means that they don’t then have to come to the site to read your posts (unless they want to comment). It would seem to make sense to me to restrict what appears in the e-mail to the first sentence/para/20 words of the post, followed by a ‘read more…’ link to the post itself (or, more ideally, to the site itself). This would as a ‘tease’ and thus draw people to the site who might otherwise just be content to read their e-mail…
And I want to know how to remove some of e-mails which had subscribed to my blog? I do not want to send them My Posts any More. Can you tell my How shall I do this?
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People will not receive emails for anything that they do not have access to. You can’t remove specific RSS subscriptions in the same way you can’t remove specific comment subscriptions or RSS subscribers.
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Hello! Finally, thanks for this, maybe this could be the solution to my traffic quest. But if my suscribers decide to read me via e-mail, that reads counts? or just counts if they visit my site?
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A pageview is only measured if they visit the site itself.
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How can i add this to my blog?
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You can let people subscribe to your blog by adding the blog subscription widget.
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Why does it sends all the post and not just the first lines?
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thank you
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This is a great feature – one which I was going to implement using Feed Burner. The only feature missing (as has been mentioned previously, so a +1 vote from me) is the ability for people to select which post categories they want to receive as emails.
BTW: FireFox crashed twice on me when viewing this page (had to use IE instead). Unsure if it’s to do with the “snow” script you are using, but can I recommend you remove it? For so many reasons (its distracting being one), and that type of script went out of fashion in the 90s and should never be used on any sort of professional website.
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We like the snow! 🙂 But you can turn it off using the links in the “A Little Snow for the Holidays” blog post.
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Since we are new at blogging at wordpress, I find this to be an excellent addition.
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I don’t see an option to add it to self-hosted blogs. If there is one, where is it? I highly suggest that should be added if it isn’t available.
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Good one
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