Default Email Templates

Benecaster sends a small set of transactional emails automatically. These are plain, functional messages — not marketing campaigns. They deliver the information subscribers need: their feed URL when they join, their new URL when they reset, confirmation when their plan changes.

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What Benecaster Sends

Welcome Email

Sent when a new subscriber token is generated for the first time.

Contains:

• The subscriber’s private RSS feed URL
• Direct links to open the feed in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro and Podcast Addict (deep links pre-fill the URL)
• A link to the subscriber account page for future reference

The welcome email is the most important email Benecaster sends — it’s how subscribers get their feed URL. Every time a new subscription activates and a token is generated, this email fires automatically.

Token Reset Email

Sent when a subscriber’s feed token is reset — either by an admin via the subscriber detail panel, or by the subscriber themselves from their account page.

Contains:

• The new private RSS feed URL (the old URL is immediately invalid)
• Deep links for Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro and Podcast Addict using the new URL
• An optional custom message if the admin added one when initiating the reset

If a subscriber’s app stops receiving episodes, this email tells them exactly what they need to do.

Tier Change Email

Sent when a subscriber’s membership tier changes — whether from a bridge event (upgrade, downgrade, cancellation + resubscribe at a different tier) or from an admin manually changing their tier.

Contains:

• Their previous tier name (struck through)
• Their new tier name (bolded)
• The subscriber account page link

This email fires for every tier change, whether done singly from the subscriber detail panel or in bulk. There’s no checkbox to gate it — changing a subscriber’s tier always sends the notification.

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Email Sending Rate

Go to Benecaster → Settings → Email to configure the sending rate.

The Emails per hour setting controls how quickly Benecaster dispatches emails from its internal queue. This applies to every subscriber-facing email type — welcome, feed URL delivery, billing, and the rest of the catalog in Automated Emails. A few one-off admin notices, like the email you get when a data export finishes, bypass the queue and send immediately instead — there’s no recipient list or opt-out to rate-limit for a message that only ever goes to you.

Emails per hour is a ceiling, not a target. Set it to match the sending limit in your SMTP provider’s plan. Most transactional email services publish this limit in your account dashboard — Mailgun calls it “sending rate,” Postmark calls it “messages per minute” (multiply by 60), SendGrid lists it under your plan details. If Benecaster queued faster than your provider allows, your provider might defer or block messages, so keep the rate comfortably below that limit.

A new sending address warms up first. While your From domain has little recent sending history, Benecaster sends fewer emails a day than this setting allows, and raises the limit each day it sends. On plain host mail it starts at 50 a day and never exceeds 2,400 a day. With an email service connected it starts at 500 and reaches your rate within a few days. An address that sends nothing for 30 days is eased back in the same way over three sending days. The Sending Warm-up section below the rate shows today’s limit. While that limit applies, raising Emails per hour won’t send any faster. The warm-up protects your domain’s sending reputation, which a sudden large send can damage for weeks. Why a New Domain Should Send Email Slowly explains it in plain terms, and Why Are My Episode Emails Sending Slowly? covers a slow queue.

Queue depth: The Email settings panel shows how many emails are currently waiting to send. Under normal conditions this is zero or near zero. A backlog that falls steadily is the rate or the warm-up at work. A backlog that stalls means your provider is deferring sends, so lower the rate or contact your provider.

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Email Format

All Benecaster emails send as multipart: HTML for modern clients, plain text as a fallback. The plain text version is auto-generated from the HTML unless you override it via the benecaster_email_body_text filter.

Emails include List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click headers (RFC 8058). Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail surface a native “Unsubscribe” button from these headers — subscribers who click it are unsubscribed from non-transactional email only. Transactional emails (feed URL delivery, token reset) are not affected.

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Broadcasts

A broadcast is a one-off message to chosen listeners of one show. They are written and sent from the Email Editor add-on; Benecaster → Broadcasts lists the ones sent, newest first, with each one’s subject, when it was sent and its progress. The list refreshes every 30 seconds while a broadcast is sending.

The Status column moves through these states:

Under the status, a broadcast also shows who it did not mail, such as 12 opted out · 2 skipped. Opted-out listeners are expected, not an error: a broadcast is a marketing email, so anyone who has unsubscribed from broadcasts, or from all email, is left out. Skipped means the listener had no email address, or the email could not be queued. A broadcast’s own page shows the same two figures in its summary bar.

A broadcast’s own page also reads Preparing — N recipients, with the spinner, in its summary bar until the first background batch has queued emails. After that it shows the usual total, sent, pending and failed figures.

Customizing

• Override templates from your theme: see Customizing Email Templates
• Change merge tags, suppress specific emails, or reroute to a third-party provider: see Customizing Email Templates
• Full merge tag reference: see Email Merge Tags
• Unsubscribe flow from the subscriber’s perspective: see Unsubscribe Handling
• Design and send episode announcements and broadcasts: see Email Editor (add-on)
• Send a broadcast from your own code: see benecaster_send_broadcast() and the Broadcasts API