Our Approval Process

When you sign up for a new plan that includes sending via our MailPoet Sending Service, our Account Approvals team will need to review your site and information about your subscriber lists to ensure you have a good experience sending with us and adhere to our Anti-Spam policy.

If you already have a MailPoet account, please login here at account.mailpoet.com/login. If you don't have an account, you can create one here.

After subscribing to a plan, you will be directed to a page with a few questions to be answered. Once you submit the answers, the subscription will be pending approval until our team reviews it. You should expect an email from us with more information about it.

If you close the survey page, you'll see these notifications on your account:

The survey

Step 1

Your website's address

Kindly make sure that your website is fully functional and ready, as we need to validate your website's content to make sure they are not in violation of our Anti Spam Policy.

Please note that newly registered domains (NRD) can be considered suspicious, hence are usually greylisted. This can affect your domain's reputation and get your subscription to be automatically rejected by our system. Greylisting is a technique used to test whether a sender is legitimate or not, and it takes at least 15 days for malicious domains to be either withdrawn or classified into one of the other, more precise categories.

We recommend checking these security-related recommendations to ensure your website and domain have a good reputation: Best Practices for Sending Marketing Emails.

Subscribers List

On top of the website address, you will also need to choose between two options to tell us about your subscribers list: 

1. Yes, I have a list to import (if you have been collecting subscribers using a different tool/service and want to migrate this list into the MailPoet plugin).
2. No, I'm starting a new list (in case you don't have any subscribers yet and will start collecting them with MailPoet through a subscription form).

Select the option that is relevant to you.

Step 2

If you've selected the " Yes, I have a list to import" option on the first step, you will be taken to this step:

If you've chosen the second option - " No, I'm starting a new list" - you will be taken to the third and last step below.

How did you collect your email list?

We want to ensure your subscribers have confirmed they want to receive your emails. Please note that having your subscribers' permission to send emails to them is not just a good sending practice, but a requirement to use the MailPoet Sending Service. You can read more about it here.

If you didn't clearly tell people they'd join your mailing list or if you're not sure you have their permission to send them emails, you'll get spam complaints and sending will be paused for your account. Before importing a list to the plugin, please refer to our Checklist Before Importing Subscribers article.

You can choose from the following options:

1. Contacts subscribed via confirmed opt-in
2. Contacts purchased a product/service
3. Purchased list from public sources
4. Contacts collected without confirmed opt-in

Note that purchasing email marketing lists might be a cheap and easy way to build a list of subscribers, but it’s not a good way to improve engagement, deliverability, or reputation. Buying lists can damage your reputation and leave a long-lasting effect on your marketing efforts. It can also put your email account at risk and violates our Anti Spam Policy.

We do not allow using:

• Purchased lists; 
• Collected business cards list;
• Personal address book list;
• Public addresses;
• Another department's list.

When was the last time you emailed this list?

Let us know when was the last time you sent an email to your list or if you haven't sent out emails at all. You can choose from these options:

1. Less than 6 months
2. More than 6 months
3. I have never emailed this list

Lists over six months old often contain email addresses that are not valid anymore because people change email addresses and these addresses will bounce. It’s not uncommon that an old list can have up to 10% invalid addresses. If you go over 10% of hard bounce emails and you're sending them through MailPoet Sending Service, you will get your MailPoet account suspended.

If it's been a while since you sent an email to your list, or if these addresses have been collected a long time ago, we strongly recommend reducing the chances of being banned by using cleaning services to help you get rid of some bad addresses before sending with MailPoet for the first time.

Even if you have consent from your subscribers from the past, if you haven’t sent too many emails to them or haven't monitored their engagement in the past, it’s likely they forgot about it and are no longer expecting emails from you, or they lost interest in your content. This could increase the chances of receiving spam reports, and will affect your MailPoet account deliverability.

Step 3

This is the last step, and all you need to do is:

1. Review your answers
2. Tick the check box to confirm you agree with the MailPoet Anti-Spam Policy
3. Click "Submit for review" button

That's it!

After submitting your answers

Your account will immediately be submitted to be reviewed by our Approvals Team. 

What happens while the subscription is pending review?

Although you can't send to your subscriber lists while the subscription is pending approval, there are a variety of other steps you can take to continue setting things up and trying out the features of the plugin:

• A great first step is to activate your MailPoet key.
• Once the key is activated, you can also install the MailPoet Premium plugin if you have a paid plan. This will be installed alongside the main MailPoet plugin (not in place of it — i.e. they both need to be installed).
• You can try out the email editor and create a newsletter, and send preview emails to authorized email addresses.
• If you have existing subscriber lists, you can import subscribers via CSV, or you can migrate subscribers from Mailchimp.
• You can try out the form editor and add a MailPoet subscription form to your website. However, while the subscription is still pending approval, new subscribers will see the message below when submitting the form:

You'll soon be able to send once our team reviews your account. In the meantime, you can send previews to your authorized emails.

The subscriber will be added to your MailPoet list as "Unconfirmed" and they won't receive the confirmation email, as the sending is not active yet. However once the subscription is approved, you can simply resend the confirmation email by following the steps listed here. If you want to send emails and have the forms working while the subscription is pending approval, you can select an alternative sending method (Other) in MailPoet > Settings > The Send With Tab.

Aside from the points above, you can also review the main features and configuration options in the plugin as described in our overview documentation here, or you can browse/search our entire knowledgebase for more information.

Pending Subscription for Websites in Development:

• Temporary Administrative Access: Grant temporary admin access to your WordPress site. This allows our Approval Team to internally review the content and setup that's not yet publicly available. Rest assured, your site’s security is paramount, and access is solely for approval purposes.
• Business Social Media Profiles: Providing links to active social media profiles pertaining to your business can help us understand your engagement with your audience, the products or services you offer, and how you present your brand online.

Pending subscription after 48 hours: what to do?

If you received the confirmation email from our team that your subscription has been approved but you're still seeing the message about the pending subscription, please go to the MailPoet > Settings > Key Activation tab and click on the "Verify" button again to update the status of the subscription;

In case we need more information to go ahead with the approval, your subscription will remain pending and we will send you an email with a few more questions about your list. For example, if the information provided about how your subscribers joined your list is unclear, you will need to send us additional information for us to approve your plan.

What to do if your subscription is not approved?

If the plan you subscribed for is not approved by our team, you're still welcome to use the MailPoet plugin. You just need to select a third-party sending method ( Other) in MailPoet > Settings > The Send With Tab to send your emails. If you'd like access to the Premium features and/or have more than 1,000 subscribers, you can subscribe to one of our Creator plans (which does not include the MailPoet Sending Service).