Uninstalling¶
In short¶
Out of the box, deleting the plugin removes nothing. If you delete it by accident or want to start over, you lose nothing: subscribers, groups, newsletters and settings are all still there afterwards, and a fresh installation finds them again.
If you really want to get rid of everything, you have to say so explicitly beforehand.
Deactivating is not deleting¶
| What you do | What happens |
|---|---|
| Deactivate | The menu disappears, the subscription form on your site accepts nobody, the cron sends nothing. Nothing is deleted — even the hourly cron entry stays |
| Delete | The files are removed. What happens to the data is decided by the setting below |
The setting¶
Newsletter → Configuration → Settings → Maintenance, section Uninstall.
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Are kept | Default. Deleting the plugin leaves everything in place |
| Are removed completely | Deleting takes everything with it, irrevocably |
Changing it asks for confirmation. In a multisite network the setting applies network-wide.
What „removed completely" covers¶
If the setting is on remove, deleting the plugin takes:
- all tables of the plugin and its modules — subscribers, groups, newsletters, delivery rows, the consent record, subscriber variables, bounces, placeholders, links and clicks;
- all settings, including the SMTP and POP3 passwords, the activation key and the security keys;
- the short-lived markers of the spam protection;
- the two message boxes in the user profile;
- the marker on posts by which the post notification remembers what has already been mailed;
- the cron entry;
- the directory
uploads/wpng/with your own templates and the attachments.
What stays in every case¶
The five pages — subscription, confirmation, cancellation, unsubscribe and archive. They are ordinary WordPress pages and may carry text of your own; a deleted page would also tear a hole in your menu. Removing them stays manual work.
The safety net: the second package¶
If the other package sits next to the one you are deleting — free next to paid or the other way round — the cleanup routine aborts and deletes nothing, even if the setting says remove.
Both packages share tables, settings and the uploads directory. Without this lock, deleting one package would take the other's subscriber list away.
So that this surprises nobody, the form says so in advance: the switch does not even appear while the second package is present. The order is therefore: first delete the package you want gone — everything stays — and then decide, in the remaining package, what should happen when it is uninstalled later.
Deleting a single subscriber¶
That is a different matter from uninstalling, but the question comes up in the same place. When a subscriber is deleted — in the backend, via an unsubscribe link, via bounce processing or via the WordPress privacy tools — all of their data goes too:
| What | |
|---|---|
| the subscriber | name, postal address, e-mail address, status |
| their group assignments | |
| their consent record | |
| their delivery rows | including the time and count of opens |
| their clicks | |
| the values of their subscriber variables | |
| their bounce entries |
Up to 1.1.4 the delivery rows and subscriber variables were left behind. With open tracking switched on that meant: the record of when a deleted subscriber opened which newsletter stayed in the database. That has been fixed.
Back up first¶
Before you delete anything that does not come back:
- Newsletter → Subscribers → CSV export — the addresses with all fields and groups.
- Newsletter → Configuration → Settings → Settings backup — the settings as a file. Set a password if the credentials should come along too.
- A database backup through your host or a backup plugin. It is the only one that really contains everything — the newsletters themselves are in neither of the two exports.