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That's not a bad idea, Viper007Bond; but it's one I'm unlikely to implement. If any name is present in the "unconfirmed" box for more than a day, it's unlikely that they will manually confirm. At least that's been my experience to date.

George: thanks for the heads-up. Fixed!

Elmar: I don't know of anyone using subscribe2 with that many subscribers. In theory, it ought not take too long to fire off batches to the mail server. I don't know what kind of time-out issues you might experience. Maybe the wpPHPmailer plugin would help speed things along, too. Good suggestion for paged subscriber listing. I'll have to evaluate how best to integrate that functionality. Don't hold your breath. And subscribe2 may not be the right tool for the job, with that many subscribers. Perhaps a real mailing list package like GNU Mailman for the actual list, combined with my cat2email plugin as glue to feed new posts to Mailman...

Clint: version 2.1.6 should be a drop-in replacement for 2.1.5. There are no changes to the database, so you can simply replace the old subscribe2.php (and optionally subscribe.php, though it hasn't chnaged much). I'm not entirely sure I understand your second question. Can you please rephrase it?

Clint: Are you using a remote publishing tool like Ecto or w.Bloggar? If so, those seem to still have trouble triggering the publish_post action on which subscribe2 relies. Are you certain that the update notification email is not being flagged as spam in your email client? If you can send notices to all subscribers through use of the Management screen, then there should be nothing to prevent the update notification emails from being delivered. Do you have access to the mail server logs?

Clint: sending mail through Outlook to your list of subscribers is not at all the same thing as using the mass-email option available at Manage->Subscribers. If some people are receiving email from my plugin, and some people are not, then the problem is almost certainly not my plugin. If you can demonstrate that all users are failing to receive messages, then I might suspect my plugin. It's almost certainly spam filtering preventing some recipients from accepting the messages.

Clint: the reason mail generated by Outlook is delivered is largely due to the way the mail "looks" to the receiving mail server(s). Mail generated by Outlook comes from your account, is labelled as coming from you, and is delivered to the recipient from your host's mail server. Mail generated by subscribe2 is generated on your web server, using the account details used by the web server software (often a user named "www-data" or "nobody"). The mail claims to be from you, but the mail server(s) know right away that it is in fact coming from a different user. This is, unfortunately, the exact same tactic used by many spammers. Some mail server admins configure their systems to strongly penalize -- or outright reject -- mail that looks spammy. I've taken steps to make subscribe2 look as legitimate as I can, but many things are outside my abilities to configre in the context of the plugin. wpPHPmailer helps, but making the entire SMTP conversation with your host's mail server appear to come from your user account (and optionally authenticating, if your provider requires that). This may help, but there's no guarantee. Here's a simple test you can try: Save the following as test.php:

<?php $to = "you@example.com"; $headers = "From: \"$myname\"; $headers .= " <you@example.com>\n"; $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"; $headers .= "Content-type: text/plain;"; $headers .= " charset=\"utf-8\"\n"; $headers .= "Bcc: other@example.com\n"; mail($to, 'Test', 'A test', $headers); ?>

Change you@example.com and other@example.com to two email addresses under your control. Then load that page, and see if the mail is delivered. Let me know what happens.

David Steeman: Thanks! Uri: the get_sidebar() placement is documented in the subscribe2.README included in the zip file. It's also mentioned here and here. Starting at line 78 of subscribe2.php, the plugin tries to figure out how to display the name for the From: header. It should use whatever format you've defined in your profile.

sojust: most of the time mail problems fall into two categories: 1) the mail is delivered, but flagged as spam in the receiving mail client. 2) some restriction at your site's ISP prevents delivery. Please confirm that #1 is not the case for you; then check with your ISP about #2.

George: unconfirmed subscribers do not receive update emails.

sojust: you'll have to contact your ISP and ask them.

derek: try re-uploading the subscribe2.php file again.

Viper007Bond: to store the timestamp of a user's subscription will require a change to the database table, which is something I'm extremely hesitant to introduce. You're in luck, though, that I've little going on tonight so I'll see what I can do.

The name of the translation files needs to be the same as the language setting in your wp-config.php: define ('WPLANG', 'fr');

Wayne: are you logged in as an administrator of level 9 or above?

Wayne: can you elaborate on your problem? Do you see the Subscribe2 menu item at all inside Options? Or, if you do see the Subscribe2 menu item, clicking it presents nothing (or the wrong screen)?

wayne: that's weird. No one else has reported any such problems. If you can, try disabling all your plugins. Then re-enable them one by one, making sure that after each activation you can still see the subscribe2 manage page.

Arthur: in WordPress 1.5.x, your proposed suggestions are quite difficult. It's unlikely that the forthcoming 1.6 release will make it any easier. If you really want that functionality, I encourage you to investigate Bloglet.

steven: does your theme have a sidebar? Is there a sidebar.php in wp-content/themes/default/ ? Pirere: When you say "page changes", do you mean updates to a published post, or do you mean modifications to a static WordPress Page? In either case, you could edit my plugin to generate notifications for these; but I likely won't make this a default feature.

Pirere: subscribe2 isn't designed to notify subscribers when you update something -- only when you add a new entry. Updating existing posts does not generate notifications, so you'd need to change a few things inside subscribe2. It might be better to use RSS or Atom feeds. If you absolutely must use email, take a look at Bloglet, which will convert your RSS feeds into emails.

steven: either create a blank file named sidebar.php inside your template, or edit subscribe.php and remove all instances of get_sidebar().

steven: thank you!

William: are you sure that the recipients are not filtering the subscribe2 emails as spam? This is the number one cause of the problem you report. Does your host limit the number of recipients per email? Do they limit the number of emails per hour, or in any other way throttle your email?

Chester: if you've selected HTML emails, you'll need to construct the anchor tag yourself: <a href="PERMALINK">PERMALINK</a>

John: no, I have no compatability list. It would impossible for me to construct such a list. If you're having email trouble, you really ought to contact your hosting provider to investigate the mail server's logs. Only your hosting provider can confirm whether the messages are being sent out.

There was a problem with older versions of WordPress not triggering the proper plugin hooks when moving a post from draft to published, but I thought it was resolved in 1.5.2 (which I see is the version you're using). It might be worthwhile trying to upgrade again, taking care to delete the core WordPress files before replacing them. Weird things have been known to happen when new files are copied over the old, which is why the upgrade documentation specifically encourages you to delete the files first.

rob: subscribe2 does not deliver any of the postmeta values you might assign to your posts. To do so, you'd need to edit subscribe2.php, and modify some portion of the subscribe2() function which prepares and delivers the email notification.

Rusty: it looks like I forgot to update subscribe.php to use wp_mail()! Simply change line 243 from mail (... to wp_mail (... and subscription confirmations should work.

If emails are successfully delivered to your admin account, and if subscription confirmation emails are successfully delivered to subscribers, then there's little I can do to troubleshoot. Check again with your hosting provider to ensure that mails are being delivered.

Rusty: thanks for the kind words! To be honest, though, I wish everyone would stop using susbcribe2 and just use RSS and Atom feeds! ;) The only difference between the confirmation emails and the new post notifications is that the confirmation emails are delivered only to the subscriber. The new post notifications are sent to the blog admin (or post author) with all the subscribers BCCed. On the systems under my control, I've not yet had any trouble with this.

Rusty, I published a small piece about RSS feeds late last year, though it's more high-level introduction than nitty-gritty howto. I think bloglines is a servicable first aggregator with which people can start learning about the joy of syndication. I wish I could provide better support for all the mail related problems that folks have experienced with subscribe2; but the number of variables involved combined with the lack of control over most servers makes it extremely difficult.

Kevin: if moving get_sidebar() does not solve the problem, then you most likely have an unclosed <div> somewhere. Sorry, but I don't provide theme support. Michael: sure, I could collect the subscriber's name, but I won't. subscribe2 sends one email per new post, with all the subscribers listed as BCC recipients. In order to send personalized email messages, you'd need to change subscribe2 to send one email per recipient per new post. If you have more than a couple subscribers, posting a new item would cause PHP to time out as it tries to send emails to all of your subscribers.

Emeric: that's very likely. I've never used hotmail, so I've no idea what they do with the mail they receive.

Mark: try using wpPHPmailer, which allows you to define Mail From addresses at the SMTP level, rather than the message headers.