Custom Joomla Extensions

• Joomla Version: Joomla 5.1+ and Joomla 6
• Extension type: Component + Module
• Price: Free (GPLv2 or later)

Simple Newsletter gives your Joomla site a mailing list without an external service. A visitor types an e-mail address into a module, confirms it by clicking a link, and from then on receives the newsletters you compose in the Joomla administrator — sent through your own server, from your own domain, with your subscriber list living in your own database.

It is built for the size of list a normal Joomla site actually has: a few dozen to a few thousand addresses. Everything that usually breaks at that scale — PHP timeouts halfway through a send, one bad address aborting the whole run, no way to tell what went wrong — is handled.

• Double opt-in. An address is stored as Pending with a 48-character random token and only becomes Confirmed when the recipient clicks the link. Nobody can add somebody else to your list.
• Six ready-made e-mail layouts — simple letter, hero with a call to action, two-column roundup, product grid, event invitation, and a text-only minimal design. Preview one, insert it, edit the words.
• Placeholders for name, e-mail, site name, site URL, date, and the unsubscribe link, replaced per recipient at send time.
• Live preview of any template rendered with sample data, before a single message goes out.
• Test send to one address, so a typo costs one e-mail instead of your whole list.
• Batched sending with a progress bar. Messages go out in configurable batches, each recipient's outcome recorded individually. A timeout costs you the current batch, not the run.
• Resume an interrupted send. Close the tab by accident and the job waits; a Resume button picks it up exactly where it stopped, with no duplicates.
• Send history listing every newsletter with sent, failed and total counts — and for each failure, the reason your mail server gave.
• One-click unsubscribe via the List-Unsubscribe header, so Gmail and Outlook show an Unsubscribe control next to your name and readers opt out instead of pressing Spam.
• Throttling for hosts that cap outgoing mail per hour.
• CSV export of your subscriber list, filtered exactly as you see it on screen.

Simple Newsletter uses Joomla's own mail settings, so whatever already works for your contact form works here too — PHP mail, SMTP or sendmail. The Send screen shows you the address messages will actually go out from, whether it comes from Global Configuration or from the component's own options, and warns you about the two settings that silently swallow newsletters: Joomla's Send Mail master switch being off, and a From address your SMTP account is not allowed to send from.

The extension makes no outgoing connections of any kind. No telemetry, no licence check, no remote fonts or scripts in the admin. The only traffic it generates is the e-mail you tell it to send. Subscriber data never leaves your server.

How it works

1. You publish the Simple Newsletter Subscribe module in a template position — a sidebar, the footer, wherever you want the form.
2. A visitor enters an e-mail address. The address is stored as Pending and a confirmation e-mail goes out.
3. They click the link in that e-mail. The address becomes Confirmed, and only confirmed addresses ever receive a newsletter.
4. You write a newsletter in Components → Simple Newsletter → Templates, starting from one of the built-in layouts if you like.
5. You open Send Newsletter, send yourself a test, then send for real. A progress bar counts through the batches.
6. Every reader gets a personal unsubscribe link, and the send is recorded in the history with per-recipient results.

Requirements

• Joomla 5.1 or newer, including Joomla 6
• PHP 8.1 or newer
• MySQL or MariaDB
• A working mail configuration in Global Configuration → Server → Mail. SMTP is strongly recommended over PHP mail: messages sent through an authenticated account are far less likely to be filtered.

No cron job is required. Sending runs from the administrator in your browser, and can be resumed if it is interrupted.

Installation

1. Log in to the Joomla administrator as a Super User.
2. Go to System → Install → Extensions.
3. On the Upload Package File tab, drop in pkg_simplenewsletter.zip.
4. Wait for the success message. The component, the site module and four database tables are set up for you, along with one example template.
5. Open Components → Simple Newsletter → Options and check the sender settings. By default the extension uses your Joomla Global Configuration mail identity, which is usually what you want.
6. Go to Content → Site Modules → New → Simple Newsletter Subscribe, choose a position, and publish it.
7. Subscribe with your own address to walk through the confirmation e-mail once, then send yourself a test newsletter.

License

Simple Newsletter is free software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version — the same licence as Joomla! itself.

You are free to:

• use it on any number of websites, personal or commercial;
• read and modify the complete, un-obfuscated PHP source code;
• redistribute it, provided you keep it under the same GPL terms and retain the copyright and licence notices.

Simple Newsletter for Joomla — Copyright © 2026 SaintArt Designs.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The complete text of the GPL v2 ships with the extension in LICENSE.txt and is available at gnu.org.

Your responsibilities as a sender

The licence covers the software, not how you use it. Sending bulk e-mail is regulated in most countries — GDPR in the EU, CAN-SPAM in the US and similar laws elsewhere. Simple Newsletter is built to keep you on the right side of them: double opt-in by default, an unsubscribe link in every supplied layout, and unsubscribed addresses kept rather than deleted so they cannot be re-added by accident. Keeping your list clean, honouring opt-outs and sending only to people who asked for it remains your responsibility.

Trademarks

Joomla!® is a registered trademark of Open Source Matters, Inc. SaintArt Designs is not affiliated with or endorsed by Open Source Matters.

Documentation

You can find the documentation here

Support

Reach us through our contact form

Download

Once installed, updates arrive through System → Update → Extensions like any other Joomla extension. No download key, no account.