I'm really surprised to see there's no blog subscription plugin for Craft?
Looking to take an email address and send email updates when new entries are created within a specified channel. Subscribers could opt-out via a link appended to each update email.
Could have a section within the CP to view current subscribers, and have an export option to export to CSV etc. Could also have a checkbox when creating a new entry to announce to subscribers or not
It appears that Solspace Freeform Pro supports some limited integrations with third party email marketing tools.
Sprout Email and Sprout Lists can support some scenarios like this and are working toward supporting more use cases.
Sprout Lists lets you define a Subscriber List and allow users to Subscribe to it. A Subscription can be any relationship between a Subscriber/User and another Element, such as a Blog Entry. If you just want a generic list, you can have users Subscribe to a List Element (provided by Sprout Lists).
Sprout Email lets you setup Notification Emails that are triggered by events, and those Notification Emails can be sent to Sprout Lists Subscriber Lists.
In your situation, you could set up a Notification that was triggered whenever a new entry was created in a specific channel, and send a dynamic Notification with into about what was updated to everyone on the list.
Note: As of this post, Sprout Email is not doing anything too fancy when it comes to sending to a list, so if your list size grows, you may run into a scenario where more optimization needs around managing larger lists. We have plans to address that scenario but it's likely that won't happen until Craft 3 or afterwards. Reach out to the Sprout team if you have any questions.
As someone who's ran their own mail server and even wrote some super basic list management software years ago, e-mail is no picnic, especially nowadays. You can integrate with some 3rd party SMTP providers like AWS SES, Postmark, etc. but you still need to do a bunch of work to make it happen.
One other common way to do this is most providers can ping your website's RSS feed periodically for new content. They handle all the legwork, cron jobs, etc. behind the scenes. You can usually spit out custom fields (like perhaps a header image, etc.) and then craft the e-mail based on those. Active Campaign and MailChimp are good examples of providers that handle this.
Setting up an RSS Feed in Craft is also super straightforward—no programming, plugins, or API necessary. You just create a new template in Craft, name it with an .rss extension and let Craft handle it like normal.
And the best thing is, if if you move providers, you can just unplug from one and setup the feed in another.
