jekcms ships its own newsletter plugin -- subscriber list, double opt-in, SMTP or mail() sending, and an automated weekly or monthly digest of new posts. No Mailchimp or Brevo required.
Why Email Still Matters
Social media algorithms change monthly. SEO rankings fluctuate. But an email list is yours — no algorithm decides whether your subscribers see your content. For content-heavy blogs, a healthy email list is one of the more reliable sources of returning visitors, independent of algorithm changes.
The Built-in Newsletter Plugin
jekcms does not integrate with Mailchimp, Brevo, or any other third-party email service provider. Instead, it ships with its own newsletter plugin: your own subscriber list, your own campaigns, and your own sending — no monthly per-subscriber fee to an external ESP.
Subscribers are stored in a newsletter_subscribers table with a status of pending, active, unsubscribed, or bounced. A new signup starts as pending and moves to active only after the subscriber clicks the confirmation link in their double opt-in email — no one receives newsletters without confirming first.
Sending: SMTP or PHP mail()
The plugin sends mail either through your configured SMTP server, using its own lightweight standalone SMTP client, or through PHP's built-in mail() function as a fallback if no SMTP is configured. There is no dependency on a third-party mail API — set your SMTP host, port, and credentials in the newsletter settings, or leave it on mail() for a quick start.
Campaigns and Templates
Campaigns, email templates, and the send queue each have their own tables (newsletter_campaigns, email_templates, newsletter_queue), so a campaign going out to a few thousand subscribers is sent in batches rather than all at once, and clicks on links inside a campaign are recorded in newsletter_clicks.
Automated Digest: Weekly or Monthly
Instead of sending a separate email for every new post, jekcms can bundle recently published posts into a single digest email sent on a weekly or monthly cadence, configurable per site. If nothing was published in the period, no digest goes out — the plugin checks for at least one new post before it bothers your subscribers. The digest is triggered by a cron job (or jekcms's cron-less scheduling for hosts without real cron access) and keeps a last_run timestamp so the same digest never goes out twice.
Unsubscribe and Compliance
Every subscriber gets a unique token used for the confirmation link and the one-click unsubscribe link, both served by dedicated frontend pages. Outgoing emails include the List-Unsubscribe header so mail clients can offer a one-click unsubscribe too.
If you need Mailchimp- or Brevo-level marketing automation — audience segmentation, A/B testing, multi-step drip sequences — jekcms's newsletter plugin does not try to replace that. It covers the core loop most blogs actually use: collect subscribers, confirm them, and keep them updated with a digest of what you published.
