Email & Newsletter
Email on VeloCMS covers two different jobs. System emails are the one-off messages the platform sends on your behalf: a reader's sign-in link, a booking confirmation, a team invitation. Newsletter campaigns are the bulk sends you write and schedule to your subscribers. Both run on managed delivery, so there's no mail server to run and no SMTP credentials to look after. What you control lives in the admin panel.
What gets sent, and when
Out of the box, every email goes out from the VeloCMS platform address. The table below covers the account and billing emails you or your team will see most often. Reader-facing mail such as sign-in links and newsletter confirmations is covered in the sections that follow.
| When it goes out | |
|---|---|
| Email verification | Right after you sign up for an account |
| Welcome | After you confirm your email address |
| Reader sign-in link | When a reader asks for a magic link on your blog |
| Password reset | When someone uses the forgot-password flow |
| Team invitation | When you invite an editor from Admin → Team |
| Trial ending | Shortly before your free trial converts to a paid plan |
| Payment failed | When Stripe can't charge your VeloCMS subscription |
| Subscription cancelled or refunded | When your VeloCMS subscription is cancelled or a refund is issued |
Send a test email
Before you tell anyone about a change to your sender setup, confirm it works. Open Admin → Settings → Email and use the Test Send card: "Send test email to me" delivers a message to your own account address, and the page tells you whether it was queued or why it failed.
Send from your own domain
By default, order, booking, event, gift-card, newsletter and sign-in emails come from the VeloCMS platform address. On the Business and Agency plans you can send them from your own domain instead, so a subscriber sees [email protected] rather than a platform address. The setup lives at Admin → Settings → Email, in the Sender Domain section.
- Enter a domain you own. A subdomain such as mail.yourdomain.com is the safest choice because it keeps your normal mailbox records untouched.
- Click Add Domain. VeloCMS shows you three DNS records: DKIM, SPF and DMARC.
- Add all three at your DNS provider. The section offers click-by-click steps for common providers like GoDaddy, Namecheap and Cloudflare, and can detect which one you use.
- Click Refresh Status. The state moves from Pending DNS to Verified once the records are visible.
DNS changes usually show up within 5 to 30 minutes, though a slow registrar can take up to 48 hours. If verification fails, the usual cause is one of the three records missing or pasted with an extra space or trailing dot, so check all three before you retry. If you remove the domain later, future emails go back to the platform address. On a plan below Business, the section shows an upgrade prompt instead of the form.
Newsletter campaigns
Campaigns live under Admin → Newsletter. You write a campaign (or start from a template), pick an audience, and either send it or schedule it. The audience can be all subscribers, free members only, paid members only, or specific tags. Each campaign moves through Draft, Scheduled, Queued, Sending and Sent, and lands in Failed if delivery breaks, so you can see where it stands from the campaign list.
Open a campaign for its stats, including open rate and a per-link click breakdown. Admin → Newsletter also has Automations for lifecycle emails like a welcome message, Tags for segmenting readers, and an Analytics view across all campaigns. You can announce a new post to subscribers by enabling the Send to subscribers option in the post editor before you publish.
Managing subscribers
Admin → Newsletter → Subscribers lists the readers who opted in, split into free and paid. Import CSV takes a file with a required email column and optional name and tags columns, and skips duplicates. New subscribers count against your plan's subscriber cap, and rows past the cap are refused in the import report. Export CSV downloads every newsletter subscriber with email, name, tier, subscription status, tags and sign-up date. Your list is yours to take elsewhere whenever you want.
Double opt-in
Turn on Require double opt-in under Admin → Settings → Email → Consent. New subscribers then get a confirmation email and only join your list after they click the link in it. That keeps typos and fake sign-ups off your list. People already on your list aren't affected when you switch it on.
Using Kit, Beehiiv or Mailchimp instead
If you already run your list in Kit, Beehiiv or Mailchimp, connect it in one place: Admin → Integrations → Newsletter. That connection is what your public subscribe form uses, so there's nothing extra to configure under the Email settings tab.
Unsubscribes
Every newsletter email carries a signed unsubscribe link. A reader can click it from any mail client without logging in, and a link can only unsubscribe the address it was created for. On a valid link the reader is switched off your newsletter list straight away, and they stay off until they choose to subscribe again. A link that's invalid shows a generic message, and it never reveals whether an address is on your list.