In a few words, anything you may need for your newsletter in Joomla!

NS Pro covers the whole cycle: sign-up forms with any fields you need, mailing lists, newsletters built from your own Joomla content, throttled and scheduled sending, autoresponders and campaigns, open and click statistics, and bounce handling.

It scales down as easily as it scales up. A single email-only field in a module is a perfectly valid NS Pro setup; so is a site with several lists, a welcome series, and tens of thousands of subscribers. NS Pro can even work with no mailing lists.

Read more on the NS Pro download page.

Installing the package installs five extensions at once:

• NS Pro component: the manager for subscribers, lists, newsletters, templates and statistics.
• NS Pro module: a subscribe form you can place anywhere, optionally in a lightbox.
• NS Pro Newsletter List module: lists your sent newsletters in the front-end, so visitors can read past issues.
• User - NS Pro User Integration plugin: adds mailing lists to the Joomla registration and profile forms.
• Search - NS Pro plugin: makes your published newsletters findable through Joomla search.

You do not need to enable all of these extensions. Just the main component and module.

No. NS Pro is a Joomla extension and runs inside your Joomla site. There is nothing to install on your computer and no external service involved. Your subscribers and your newsletters stay in your Joomla database.

The currently supported Joomla and PHP versions are always listed on the NS Pro download page, because they change as Joomla itself moves forward.

No. NS Pro keeps its own subscriber records, so somebody can subscribe to your newsletter without ever creating a Joomla account, and a Joomla user is not a subscriber unless they choose to be.

If you want the two connected, enable the User - NS Pro User Integration plugin. It can show your mailing lists on the registration and profile forms, subscribe new users to fixed lists automatically, and keep the subscriber record in step when a user changes their email address.

None imposed by NS Pro. Unlimited sites and domains, unlimited mailing lists, unlimited subscribers, unlimited newsletters.

The real limits are your host's: how many emails per hour your server or SMTP provider allows, and how long a PHP script may run. Both are handled by the throttling and scheduling options. See the Sending & Scheduling section below.

Yes, on two levels.

Most of the visible front-end wording (form labels, placeholders, button text, thank-you messages) is editable directly in the module and menu-item options, with no language file involved. That covers most cases.

For anything deeper, NS Pro ships with full language files (currently English, German and French) that you can copy and translate. Please use Joomla's language overrides rather than editing the ini files, so your changes survive updates.

Yes. NS Pro includes its own guided tour equivalent. It introduces the interfaces for lists, subscribers, extra fields, newsletters and the toolkit. If you have just installed NS Pro and are not sure where to start, that is the shortest path.

Unlimited usage on unlimited domains and websites, unlimited support, and free updates for one year.

You may install it on other people's sites. That is what "unlimited domains" means. What you should not do is pass on the zip archive itself. The people you give it to cannot receive support or updates, and an unmaintained copy of a newsletter extension is a liability for them rather than a favour.

Yes. The licence does not expire and nothing stops working. What the annual renewal buys is another year of updates and support. For an extension that sends email, is worth having: deliverability rules, Joomla versions and PHP versions all keep moving.

The simplest way is to let Joomla do it. Once you have entered your download key in the NS Pro update site, updates will appear in Joomla's own System > Update > Extensions screen along with everything else.

You can always download the package manually instead, from Connect > My Purchases with your Mavxr.com account.

Go to System > Install > Extensions, choose the Upload Package File tab, select the zip archive you downloaded, and let it install. Install the package file (pkg_nspro.zip), not the individual extension zips inside it.

There isn't one. NS Pro works out of the box.

Realistically, three things are worth doing before you send anything to real people: check your Joomla mail settings, publish a subscribe form, and send yourself a test newsletter. Everything else can wait until you need it.

In System > Global Configuration > Server > Mail. Use SMTP rather than PHP Mail wherever your host allows it. PHP Mail gives you no authentication, which is exactly what spam filters are looking for.

Whatever you use, the sender address must be one that genuinely belongs to your domain, and the same address should generally be set in Joomla and in NS Pro.

NS Pro includes the ability to set your own Custom SMTP details, if you wish to have a separate configuration than your Joomla mails.

Yes. In NS Pro Options > Custom SMTP you can point newsletters at a completely separate SMTP server, with its own host, port, encryption, credentials and sender details, while the rest of Joomla keeps using the global configuration.

This is the usual arrangement once you outgrow your host's mail server: transactional site email stays where it is, and bulk newsletters go through a dedicated sending service.

Yes. On the source site, open the Toolkit and go to the Migration tab to export a migration file; on the destination site, import that same file from the same tab.

Two things to be aware of. Importing a migration file deletes the existing records for every table contained in it, so it is meant for populating a new install, not merging two live ones. And only database records travel. Newsletter images and attachments have to be copied across by hand.

Treat the migration file as sensitive information: it is a complete copy of your subscriber data.

Yes, from the Toolkit > Import / Export tab, which accepts CSV, plain text and the Newsletter Subscriber format. Each format has a "click for example" link showing the exact layout expected, including extra fields.

There is also a mass email import for the common case of a plain list of addresses, and a tool to import your Joomla users as subscribers in one step.

Please only import people who actually agreed to hear from you. An imported list of strangers is the fastest way to get your domain blacklisted.

Yes. Enable the User - NS Pro User Integration plugin. It adds a subscribe checkbox and your mailing lists to the registration and profile forms, or subscribe every new user to a fixed set of lists silently.

The plugin also handles the case everyone forgets: when a user changes their email address in their profile, you choose whether the matching subscriber record follows them, stays as it was, or is removed.

Two ways, and you can use both at once:

• Publish an NS Pro module in any template position — the usual choice for a sidebar or footer form.
• Create an NS Pro > Subscribe Form menu item — a full page, useful when the form is long or you want to link to it directly.

Both offer the same field and list options, so pick whichever fits the page.

A third, less common option is to link directly to the menu item (or index.php?option=com_nspro) and include &tmpl=component in the URL, so that you can embed that in an iframe of a separate web page.

Yes, as many as you like, each showing a different subset of fields and lists. Use Fixed Field IDs to control which extra fields appear in a given form, and Fixed List IDs to control which mailing lists it applies to.

A short email-only form in the footer and a detailed form on a dedicated landing page can happily coexist and feed the same subscriber base.

Yes, in NS Pro > Extra Fields. Available types are text inputs, text areas, boolean fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdown boxes and hidden fields.

Extra fields are not only for display. You can personalise newsletters with their values, and filter who receives a newsletter based on them.

Yes. Each field can carry either a regular expression of your own or one of the built-in validators, such as #email#, #us_zip_code# or #ip_address#.

Yes, with a hidden extra field whose default value is one of the predefined placeholders: #subscriber_ip#, #page_url#, #web_browser# or #operating_system#.

#page_url# is more useful than it first looks. It tells you which page each subscriber signed up from, which is the cheapest form of campaign attribution there is.

Yes. Enter the list IDs in Fixed List IDs and choose Use Fixed List IDs. Everyone who subscribes through that form automatically joins those lists, and the list selector is not shown at all.

If you would rather let people opt out, choose Use Fixed List IDs as Default Checked instead: the lists are shown, already ticked, and the subscriber can untick them.

Yes. In NS Pro > Subscribers, filter or search for the subscribers you want, select them, and use the Batch button. From there you can assign them to a mailing list, remove them from one, or change their confirmed status — in one operation.

The NS Pro module includes a built-in anti-spam question, a captcha and a honeypot field. For questions, you can set your own question and its expected answer. There is also an optional accept terms checkbox, which is worth having for consent reasons anyway.

Beyond that, Double Opt-In is the strongest measure: an address that never confirms never becomes an active subscriber, so scripted sign-ups quietly go nowhere.

For individual addresses that keep coming back, use the Blacklisted Emails option in NS Pro Options, a semicolon-separated list of addresses that are simply not allowed to subscribe.

Yes. People who can change their preferences are much less likely to reach for the spam button.

Put an Edit Lists link in your newsletters using the smart text {link:EDITLISTS}Your text here{/link}. It takes the subscriber to a page where they can tick and untick your mailing lists themselves, without unsubscribing entirely.

A placeholder you write into a newsletter that is replaced with real content at the moment the email is sent. That is what makes your newsletters different for every recipient.

They fall into a few groups: subscriber information ({subscriber_name}, {subscriber_first_name}, {subscriber_email}…), system links and URLs (unsubscribe, edit lists, forward to friend, view online), content inclusion, conditional content, latest content, and general values such as {date} or {year}.

You never have to memorise them. The newsletter editor has a Smart Text panel listing every tag with its description, and it tells you which ones work in the subject line, the HTML body and the plain text version.

Yes, and this is one of the most useful things NS Pro does. You write the content once, as an article, and the newsletter picks it up.

Use the {include:…} smart texts. You can include a whole article, or just its title, intro text, full text, intro image, full-text image, publication date, read-more link, or the value of a custom article field. You can also include a module, an entire module position, all articles in a category, or all articles carrying a tag.

For example, {include:articleintro}42{/include} drops the intro text of article 42 into the email.

In your newsletter edit page, there's a Content tab that allows the quick writing of such smart texts with a dedicated interface.

Yes, and this is one of its most powerful features. This is what the {latest-articles} smart text is for, and combined with a recurring newsletter it produces a digest that needs no work from you at all.

It takes options: ref (required — your own reference code, which is how NS Pro remembers which articles it has already sent so the same article never appears twice), catids, tags, language, fields (title, introtext, image_intro, readmore, fulltext, image_fulltext), layout and img_position.

If you want it to look exactly like your site, put a custom layout in templates/your_template/html/com_nspro/layouts/. NS Pro picks it up automatically when it is named after your reference code.

Yes, with the conditional smart texts.

{if:field_1=15}your content{/if:field_1=15} shows a block only to subscribers whose extra field has that value. For example, you can create different offers by city, different wording by interest, and so on.

{random:50%}your content{/random} shows a block to a percentage of recipients, which is a simple way to test two versions against each other.

Reusable HTML templates, so every issue shares a layout; per-newsletter style options for link colour, font and decoration, applied at send time; attachments; a preview line (the preheader text most email clients show next to the subject); and a plain text version of each newsletter.

No. Every email goes out in two parts, HTML and plain text, and if you leave the plain text version empty NS Pro builds one from the HTML being sent, writing each link out as its text followed by its address.

You can still write your own whenever a newsletter deserves it. If the Plain Text Version field has content, NS Pro uses it as-is.

Yes. Enable Forward To Friend in NS Pro Options and put {link:FTF}Send this to a friend{/link} in your newsletter. The link opens a small form where the subscriber enters the recipient's address.

Yes. Publish the NS Pro Newsletter List module, or create a newsletter list menu item, and your sent newsletters appear as an archive. You can restrict it to particular mailing lists and limit how many are shown.

Enabling the Search - NS Pro plugin also makes those newsletters findable through Joomla's own search — a quiet source of traffic, since newsletter content is usually not published anywhere else.

Add {link:NEWSLETTER}View this online{/link} to your newsletters so recipients whose email client mangles the HTML can read it properly on your site.

With Email Throttling. On each newsletter, set Emails Per Send to a batch size your host is happy with, and NS Pro sends that many at a time instead of all at once.

To have the batches continue on their own, choose Scheduled to Send and pick a Minutes Interval. Combined with a cron job key, the newsletter works through your list steadily without anybody watching it.

You can set defaults for both in NS Pro Options so every new newsletter starts out safe.

Generate a key at the Cron Job Key Generator and paste it into NS Pro Options > Advanced. Our cron service will trigger your site at least twice per hour (depending on your newsletter's minute intervals) and perform scheduled actions.

If you wish to set up your own cron job in your hosting environment, you are also free to do so. You may just generate the key from our generator and use the provided script in your cron task.

That single trigger drives everything time-based in NS Pro: throttled batches, scheduled newsletters, recurring newsletters, autoresponders, campaigns, bounce checking and log purging.

The Scheduled Sending option on each newsletter is where most of NS Pro's automation lives. The choices are grouped:

• Manual: you press send.
• Scheduled to send: goes out at a date and time you choose.
• Regular newsletter: repeats on an interval, either duplicating itself each time or clearing its sending status and going again.
• Autoresponder: sent in response to an event rather than on a clock.
• Campaign after subscription: sent a set number of days after somebody subscribes.
• After unsubscription: sent when somebody leaves.
• Subscription / Unsubscription confirmation: replaces the built-in system emails with a newsletter of your own design.

Yes. Create one newsletter per step, set each to Campaign after subscription, and give each a different delay: day 1, day 3, day 7, and so on, either from the preset list or as an exact number of days.

Every new subscriber then walks through the sequence from their own sign-up date, without you scheduling anything by hand. It needs a working cron job key to run.

Yes, with Sending Filters on the newsletter. These narrow the recipients by the values of your extra fields, so a newsletter aimed at one city, one interest or one customer type goes only to the people it concerns.

Filters combine with the mailing list selection rather than replacing it. You are always narrowing, never widening.

Create the newsletter with no mailing list selected. NS Pro then treats it as addressed to everyone, including subscribers who never picked a list.

Yes, and you should. The Toolkit > Newsletter Testing tab can send any newsletter to a custom address, or to a few selected subscribers.

Including yourself as a real subscriber is the more revealing test, because that is the only way to see the personalisation, the smart texts and the unsubscribe links behave as they will in the real thing. You may also test-send the newsletter directly from the newsletter edit page, without saving.

An optional check that scores a newsletter the way a receiving mail server would, before you send it to thousands of people. It tells you which parts of your content are working against you — typically the subject line, the text-to-image ratio, or link formatting.

It is configured with a Spam Check key in NS Pro Options > Advanced. Using the same key across all your NS Pro sites lets them share the same allowance from our affiliate service.

Nothing is lost, and nobody is emailed twice. NS Pro records which subscribers have already received a newsletter, so when sending resumes it continues from where it stopped.

If a sending session dies outright (a PHP timeout, a server restart) NS Pro waits for the Abandoned Session Interval (in NS Pro Options) and then allows a new session to take over. If a newsletter appears stuck, that interval is the first setting to look at. This feature allows you to manually send your newsletters, as well. You click Send and then continue again later.

Yes, generated automatically. The Statistics screen shows subscriber growth over time and per-newsletter performance, and the Recipients screen breaks a single newsletter down by person: who received it, who opened it and how many times, who clicked and which links.

The recipients list can be filtered by newsletter, by mailing list, by date range and by whether the person opened, so it doubles as a way to find your engaged subscribers.

Turn on Enable Link Tracking in NS Pro Options. NS Pro then rewrites the links in your newsletters so it can record clicks, and you get unique and total click counts per newsletter and per subscriber, plus a list of exactly which links each person clicked.

Yes. Each newsletter has an Actions section, where you pair an event with an action.

The events are sent, opened, and a particular link clicked. The actions are assign to mailing lists and remove from mailing lists.

That is enough to build genuinely useful behaviour: move everyone who clicks the "tell me more" link onto an interested-customers list, take people who opened out of the re-engagement list, or start a follow-up campaign for one group only. Click-based actions need link tracking enabled.

In the Sending Log, which records every sending session, campaign run, spam check and status change, with timestamps and the user responsible.

When a scheduled newsletter has not gone out and you are not sure whether the cron ran at all, this is the screen that answers the question. You can have entries older than 30 days purged automatically with the Purge Sending Log option.

Almost always authentication rather than content. In order of impact:

1. SPF: a DNS record naming the servers allowed to send for your domain.
2. DKIM: a cryptographic signature on each message. NS Pro can sign your newsletters itself; see below.
3. DMARC: a DNS record telling receivers what to do when the first two fail.
4. A sender address on your own domain, matching in Joomla and NS Pro, and not a free mailbox such as Gmail.
5. The List-Unsubscribe header, which NS Pro adds by default — leave it on.
6. Throttling. A sudden burst from a domain that never sends bulk email looks exactly like a compromised account.

Then look at content: a working unsubscribe link, a reasonable ratio of text to images, and no link shorteners.

Yes. NS Pro Options > Advanced has DKIM settings — domain, selector, private key and passphrase — which are passed to the underlying PHPMailer.

Only enable this if you are comfortable with what it does, and don't forget to publish the matching public key in your domain's DNS records. A DKIM signature that fails to verify is worse than no signature at all.

If you send through an external SMTP provider, that provider is usually signing for you already — in which case leave this off.

A header that tells email clients to show their own one-click unsubscribe button next to your message. NS Pro includes it by default and you should keep it that way.

It feels counterintuitive to make unsubscribing easier, but the alternative is people clicking "report spam" instead, and that damages your domain for everyone.

Having this enabled does not guarantee the existence of a one-click unsubscribe button in all email clients, even if they show it for other domains.

In NS Pro Options > Bounces, enter the mailbox that receives your bounces — server, port, protocol (IMAP or POP), security and credentials — and enable the bounce check. You can run it manually, or automatically alongside your cron job key.

Your server needs PHP's IMAP extension available for this to work.

NS Pro escalates. You configure three levels of response, so a first bounce, a repeated bounce and a persistent bounce can each be treated differently — typically moving the subscriber to a quarantine list first, and only removing them once it is clear the address is genuinely dead.

You can also be notified when a bounce is processed, cap how many messages are examined per run, and keep a log of what the check did.

This matters more than it sounds: continuing to mail addresses that no longer exist is one of the clearest signals to a receiving server that your list is not maintained.

It gives you the tools; the compliance is yours. What NS Pro provides:

• Double Opt-In — proof that the address holder agreed, rather than somebody typing it in.
• Mailing list history — a record of when each subscriber joined or left each list, and through which route.
• Extra fields — for recording consent text, timestamps or anything else you need to keep.
• Unsubscribe links in every newsletter, plus a self-service page for changing list preferences.
• Export of a subscriber's data, and deletion that really deletes.

All of it stays in your own database. Nothing is sent to any third party.

This is not legal advice. What your particular site needs depends on your jurisdiction and what you do with the data.

Yes. Each subscriber's record has a History tab showing every time they were added to or removed from a mailing list, with the date and the source: a front-end form (module or menu item), the administrator, an import, the user integration plugin, or a newsletter action.

This is the answer to "I never signed up for this", and it is worth knowing it exists before you need it.

One caveat: history is recorded from the update that introduced the feature onwards. Anything that happened before then is not shown, because it was never recorded.

With Double Opt-In, subscribing sends a confirmation email, and the subscription only completes when the person clicks the link in it. Enable it in NS Pro Options > Subscription Confirmation.

Yes, you should use it. It is required in several jurisdictions, it keeps typos and bot sign-ups out of your list entirely, and a list of confirmed addresses bounces less — which improves deliverability for everybody on it.

You can design the confirmation email yourself: create a newsletter and set its scheduling to Subscription Confirmation, using {conf_link} or {conf_url} for the confirmation link.

Because something else clicked for them. Corporate spam filters and security appliances routinely visit every link in an incoming email to check where it goes — including your unsubscribe link.

The fix is Additional Confirmation step to unsubscribe in NS Pro Options. The unsubscribe link then leads to a page with a button, which an automated scanner will not press. There is an optional captcha on that page as well.

That is your choice. Keep Newsletter Sent Data in NS Pro Options controls whether the sending data and statistics for a newsletter survive when the newsletter itself is deleted.

Keep it on if you care about historical reporting; turn it off if your retention policy says the data should go when the newsletter does.

This comes from Joomla's mail configuration, not from NS Pro. Check System > Global Configuration > Server > Mail, and make sure the sender email address is the same in Joomla and in NS Pro.

Switching from PHP Mail to SMTP resolves this in most cases — many hosts have disabled the PHP mail function entirely.

The mail server rejected the recipient. Usually either the address is malformed, or your SMTP provider does not allow the sender address you are using — many require the "from" address to match the authenticated account exactly.

Open error_report.txt to find which subscriber's address caused the failure. Correct or remove that address, then resume sending — NS Pro continues from where it stopped rather than starting over.

To have NS Pro skip past malformed addresses instead of stopping, turn off Stop Sending on Malformed Emails in NS Pro Options.

Check the permissions on both upload directories: components/com_nspro/uploads and administrator/components/com_nspro/uploads.

If the file uploads but is rejected, check Allowed Filetypes and Attachment Max Filesize in NS Pro Options — and remember your PHP configuration has its own upload limit that NS Pro cannot exceed.

Email clients have far stricter HTML and CSS rules than browsers, and some of them are decades behind. Build newsletters with HTML tables for layout, inline styles, background colours and plain img tags. Avoid external stylesheets, flexbox, grid, and anything you would reach for on a normal web page.

Always include {link:NEWSLETTER}View this online{/link} so anyone whose client mangles it can read the newsletter on your site instead.

NS Pro shows only sent newsletters in the front-end. While a newsletter is still working through its batches it remains Pending, so the link finds nothing until sending finishes. You may set the Newsletter's Published in front-end field to Published up front.

Both views are off by default. Enable them in NS Pro Options > Optional Features.

Joomla cannot authenticate against the commercial download server. Enter your download key in the NS Pro update site, and the update will go through. Your download key is found in your account's active purchases.

Almost always the trigger rather than the newsletter. Work through it in this order:

1. Is a Cron Job Key set in NS Pro Options > Advanced?
2. When creating the key, did you select "Only Generate Key"? Then you need to set up your own cron job task.
3. Does the Sending Log show sending sessions starting? If it does, the trigger works.
4. Is a previous session still marked as running? Check the Abandoned Session Interval or go into the last Sending Session and click "Mark as Finished". Only do that if you are certain that it has stopped running on your server.

Turn on Enable Debug in NS Pro Options > Advanced, reproduce the problem, and you will get considerably more detail about what went wrong.

Then post on the support forum with your Joomla version, PHP version, NS Pro version and what the debug output said. Support is answered by the person who wrote the extension.