MailPoet Wastes Developer Time

I use MailPoet on my personal site to run my email lists and that means I sometimes have it active when I’m developing locally. When I have any site set up to develop locally I use the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant to tell WordPress that I’m on a local site, but unfortunately MailPoet doesn’t respect this.

I found out that MailPoet is monitoring my emails (fine) and found that I had some URL’s that were unreachable at curtismchale.test because they’re on my local computer and can’t be reached by anyone but me. Thus my account was blocked from sending and marked as spam. I got a fairly pleasant but strongly worded email about sending spam and my account is now under review until I confirm that I’ve removed the curtismchale.test domain.

So instead of using built in features of WordPress to make my life easy MailPoet wants me to always make sure I disable the plugin locally so I don’t send emails. That sounds good, but I’ve found bugs in MailPoet during local development that I would not have found in a live environment. Bugs I was able to fix or work around because I was developing locally.

What MailPoet should do is what WooCommerce Subscriptions does, notice I’m on a local environment and then put up a nag about being disabled because I’m probably local and if I want it to process payments or emails anyway I have to click a button.

I never have to manually worry about WooCommerce Subscriptions trying to charge my users twice because they built a plugin that anticipates developer needs.

I’ll forget to turn MailPoet off some other time when I’m doing development and I’ll get another email about it. Maybe next time they’ll shut my account down…but that could be fixed if they added the local check.

Yes I did mention that to the support agent, but I likely won’t wait for them to add the feature. I’ll likely build a plugin that lets you choose plugins to turn off locally that will automatically turn them off if it detects WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE set to local.