battles with newsletter emails

January 31st 2026

This is a quick post to make notes of the trials and tribulations I went through to get the newsletter emails to work nicely ~ it’s a long horror story really… I’m making note of it as a short list for future reference only.

Sending emails

Quick tool recommendation: Mail Tester

Test the Spammyness of your Emails
This site has various very useful-looking tools, I only used the email deliverability test which then reported back details of settings and related errors. Those really helped to track down the issues. Very handy ツ

mail tester

summary of solving the issues

  • plugins: thenewsletterplugin.com + WP Mail SMTP
  • initial setup via server failed|insert hours of research/reading/battling with settings| ~ despite change from mailing via PHP to SMTP ~ annoyingly all test sends worked fine…
  • change to using external service to handle emailing (free plan on brevo.com) ~ painless setup which included updating of DNS records (new TXT records, DKIM (new CNAME records), update/addition to DMARC record)
  • this finally worked ~ but as by then I had added more content, it seems the newsletter was too long, too heavy for some email clients like gmail and outlook… the message was truncated :-\

HTML email test

When I realised that the email had been truncated for some – I did a ton more reading and it became clear that the newsletter I’d sent was just too long and heavy and it was a typical occurence. One of the links caused this to be added to a block list as well… so more trouble with this one.

I downloaded the email and it was 122kb – apparently gmail has a limit of 102kb. I checked the plugin settings for how I could optimise the code or do anything else ~ nothing… the editor is fine for simple emails and does a decent job in formatting and so on, but no control over the code at all. Well, I can’t even keep links underlined which I see as a huge flaw…

So I went on another trip down a cul-de-sac… There’s an option to code the email as HTML – just a box that allowed me to add my code. I was hopeful! I like coding so thought this would solve all my problems easily… but…. nope….

I coded the message in HTML, experimented with CSS in <head> tag as well as inline – all good – preview in the editor showed everything looking just fine; sent a test email – and the problems began… I made notes of the rest in my test email (shown as screenshot after the post text) so I won’t repeat the saga here… in short, I gave up on this, at least for now…

For upcoming newsletters, I will stick to the plugin’s editor, be more conscious of the length as well ~ I will keep adding images and links and hope the shorter content will make up for this. And I will avoid using .webp format images at all costs.

Here’s the page of the HTML newsletter test, just uploaded to the server for preview ~ it should render fine in the browser ツ ~ quick screenshot for easy viewing.

Just for future reference, here’s the test email in Outlook… :-\