Announcement Mailer

NodeBB plugin to send bulk announcement emails to user groups from the admin panel.

What it does

• ACP page where you pick groups, write an HTML template, hit send
• Send now or schedule for later
• Auto-create a draft email when a topic is posted in a configured category (sent after admin approval)
• Test send to a single address before blasting the list
• Unsubscribe link + List-Unsubscribe header
• Tracking pixel for open rate
• Hard bounces are added to a bounce list and skipped on subsequent sends
• Retry failed deliveries
• Template library (save and reuse)
• History view with per-job progress, success/fail counts, remaining queue size

Install

In your NodeBB directory:

npm install nodebb-plugin-announcement-mailer
./nodebb activate nodebb-plugin-announcement-mailer
./nodebb build
./nodebb restart

For local development, npm link inside the plugin folder, then npm link nodebb-plugin-announcement-mailer from NodeBB.

Tested on NodeBB v4.x.

SMTP settings

ACP > Plugins > Announcement Mailer:

• smtpHost, smtpPort (587 or 465), smtpUser, smtpPass
• smtpFrom (falls back to smtpUser)
• batchSize (default 10), batchDelay ms (default 2000), emailDelay ms (default 200)
• maxRetries (default 3)

Tune the batch values to your provider's rate limit. Don't try to push thousands of emails through Gmail or Outlook — your account will get throttled or your mail will end up in spam. Use a transactional provider (SendGrid, Mailgun, SES, Postmark, etc).

Send a /test email to yourself first and check the rendered output before running a real campaign.

Auto announcements

If you set announcementCategoryId, a draft email is created whenever a new topic is posted in that category. Admins get a notification and the mail won't go out until someone approves it from the ACP. You can also cancel it from there.

Related settings:

• autoEmailGroups — recipient groups
• autoEmailSubject — defaults to Yeni Duyuru: {topicTitle}
• autoEmailTemplate — body HTML

Placeholders available in templates: {topicTitle}, {topicUrl}, {topicContent}, {authorName}, {username}, {email}, {unsubscribeUrl}.

Topic content is HTML-escaped before being injected, so user-supplied markup won't break the template.

Things to know

• If NodeBB restarts mid-send, the job is marked interrupted. The queue still lives in the DB but it isn't auto-resumed. Retry only re-sends the failures list, not addresses still sitting in the queue. Worth keeping in mind for 8k+ sends.
• Transporter pool size is 3, connections recycle every 50 messages.
• The tracking pixel is a plain GIF — image proxies and blockers will hide it, so the open rate underreports.
• Jobs are guarded by a jobLock mutex; two admins can't retry/cancel/approve the same job at the same time.

License

MIT