We have just released Mailster v1.5 which brought many new features towards helping our customers to run their operations in a GDPR compliant way.
This post gives you an overview of the improvements, the full list of changes can be found in our Mailster v1.5.0 changelog entry.
Subscription Log
Starting with this version, all the subscription actions are recorded to a log database. The idea is that this can serve the mailing list operators for audit purposes.
It stores subscription information like who joined when to which list using which email address (and IP address).
The subscription log can also be exported to a CSV file.
Retention Period for Email Archive
In our pro-versions (Mailster Essential / Mailster Business / Mailster Ultimate), you can now control how long the past email conversations are kept in the database.
Besides the option to keep them indefinitely (or to not keep them at all), you now can set a retention period in the mailing list settings.
When enabled, Mailster will purge the emails from the database which were received before the set amount of days.
Terms of Service Checkbox
In our subscription widgets (that you can include on your site either via the Subscriber Module or with the Subscriber Plugin), you can now include a checkbox for requiring the acceptance of your terms of service / privacy policy.
Only after the user accepts the terms by clicking the checkbox, a subscription is allowed.
Opt-In Confirmation of Admin-Actions
Speaking of requiring the users acceptance: for our existing double opt-in/-out feature (available in our pro-versions Mailster Essential / Mailster Business / Mailster Ultimate) we have built an extension so that the user's consent can also be asked for when the administrator adds users to mailing lists in the backend.
When it is enabled, and an admin adds a user to a mailing list in the Joomla backend, the user will get a confirmation (opt-in) request via email. Only after the user accepts by clicking the link, the user is subscribed to the list.
Please note that this feature only applies for admin actions related to list-to-user-relationships, i.e. it is not working for adding/removing whole groups.