2026年11月14日

Start an Email Newsletter on WordPress with MailPoet (Forms, Opt-in)

SEO & Performance

This article is a localized edition of the Japanese original. Read the Japanese original

An email newsletter is a way to bring people who have visited your site once back again by sending them new articles and announcements. In WordPress, an email plugin lets you handle everything from placing a signup form to sending from the admin screen.

This article uses MailPoet, which is distributed on WordPress.org, and walks through placing a signup form and sending your first email. The screen labels were checked with MailPoet 5.45.2 and WordPress 7.1.3 as of November 2026.

Before you start: key points of Japan’s Specified Electronic Mail Act

In Japan, email sent by a company or a sole proprietor to advertise or promote their own or someone else's business is "specified electronic mail" under the Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail (特定電子メール法). That covers product announcements and sale notices, and also newsletters that include business promotion. The main obligations are as follows (the text of the law can be checked on e-Gov, Japan's official law database).

Obligation	What it means
Prior consent (opt-in)	Send only to people who asked for the email or agreed to receive it (Article 3, paragraph 1)
Keeping records of consent	Keep records showing that consent was given (Article 3, paragraph 2)
Honoring unsubscribe requests	Do not send to people who have told you to stop (Article 3, paragraph 3)
Required disclosures	The sender's name, and the email address or URL for unsubscribe requests (Article 4). The ordinance for enforcement also requires a statement that recipients can opt out, the sender's address, and a contact point for complaints and inquiries (phone number, email address or URL)

Email addresses collected through a signup form are also personal information. State the purpose of use (sending the newsletter) in your privacy policy. Do not buy lists or add addresses received through your contact form without permission.

Step 1: Install MailPoet and do the initial setup

Go to Plugins → Add New Plugin, search for MailPoet, then install and activate "MailPoet – Newsletters, Email Marketing, and Automation".
Open MailPoet in the left menu to see an introduction page. Start the Welcome Wizard from there and set the sender name, the sender email address and so on.

With WP-CLI, this command installs and activates it:

wp plugin install mailpoet --activate

Once setup is finished, the MailPoet menu shows Home, Emails, Automations, Forms, Subscribers, Lists, Segments and Settings.

According to the WordPress.org plugin page, the free version covers up to 1,000 subscribers and adds MailPoet branding to emails. Beyond that, or to remove the branding, you need a paid plan. Prices and conditions can change, so check MailPoet's official site.

Step 2: Choose the sending method

Under MailPoet → Settings → Send With..., choose where emails are sent from.

Sending method	Description
MailPoet Sending Service	The delivery service provided by MailPoet. Using it makes the sign-up confirmation email (Step 4) mandatory, and sender domain authentication is also required
Your web host / web server	Sends with the server's PHP mail function (the default). By default it sends 25 emails every 5 minutes
Other	Sends through an SMTP server, Amazon SES or SendGrid that you specify

Shared hosting mail often has an hourly sending limit, and sending in bulk makes your mail more likely to be marked as spam. If you expect your readership to grow, use a delivery service or an external SMTP server. Whichever method you use, setting up SPF and DKIM for the sending domain helps delivery.

After choosing the method, send an email to yourself with Send preview (Step 7) and check that it arrives (and is not filtered as spam).

Note that MailPoet stops sending email on sites it judges to be development or staging sites. If you see a notice that sending is paused on your live site, follow the notice to turn sending on.

Step 3: Prepare a list

Open MailPoet → Lists; a list called Newsletter mailing list already exists. For a single newsletter, you can use it as is. If you want separate lists by topic, create them with Add new list.

Step 4: Enable the confirmation email (double opt-in)

Enable sign-up confirmation under MailPoet → Settings → Sign-up Confirmation is on by default. If you leave it on, people who sign up through a form receive a "Confirm your subscription" email and are not sent anything else until they click the link in it.

If someone signs up another person's address, that person receives nothing but the confirmation email.
Mistyped addresses and bot signups are less likely to stay on your list.
Subscriber data records the IP address at signup and the time of confirmation. Decide what you keep as your record of consent, and export subscribers to store them if needed.

Step 5: Create a signup form and place it

In MailPoet → Forms, click Add new form, choose a template and edit it.
In the form settings, choose the list subscribers are added to (Step 3).
Under Form placement, choose where it appears: below posts, popup, fixed bar, slide-in, widget and more.
Save it and check how it looks on the front end.

To place a form anywhere in a post or page, add the MailPoet subscription form block in the block editor and select the form you created.

Briefly stating the following on the form makes people more likely to sign up:

What they will receive (for example, new article alerts or a monthly roundup)
How often you send
That they can unsubscribe at any time

By default, MailPoet protects forms with its built-in CAPTCHA. Bot signups hurt deliverability, so leave the protection on.

Step 6: Check the unsubscribe link and required disclosures

The footer of MailPoet emails contains Unsubscribe and Manage subscription links. Readers can stop receiving emails from there.

The template footer contains the placeholder text "Add your postal address here!". Replace it so that it meets the disclosure requirements of the Specified Electronic Mail Act:

The sender's name
The sender's address
A contact point for complaints and inquiries (phone number, email address or URL)
A statement that readers can unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of the email

Step 7: Create and send an email

Create a new email with Add new email under MailPoet → Emails. MailPoet can create these types of email:

Type	When to use it
Newsletter	Send an announcement or roundup once
Welcome Email	Sent automatically to new subscribers right after signup (a first greeting, an introduction to popular articles)
Latest Post Notifications	Automatically sends your new posts together at a set interval
Re-engagement Emails	Sent to readers who have not opened your emails for a while

After choosing a template and writing the content in the editor, send it to yourself with Send preview, and check the layout, links and footer on both a smartphone and a computer before sending it out.

Where to place forms to gain readers

At the end of articles: People who finish an article are interested in the topic, so a form below the article is a likely place to get signups.
Highly relevant pages: On popular articles or category top pages, place a form that promises updates on that topic.
Use popups sparingly: Adjust when and how often they appear, and make sure they do not keep reappearing once closed (MailPoet records dismissals in a cookie).
Welcome email: Introducing your most-read articles in the email sent right after signup gives readers a reason to come back to the site.

Questions about WordPress? The publisher of this site is based in Japan and replies in Japanese. Contact (Japanese)