: Allow access to WordPress site only by links in email newsletters I send out a personal email newsletter, and have been looking into sending it via some service like MailChimp, or sendy.co.

@Jessie594

Use MailChimp's built-in archive features

MailChimp automatically hosts a version of each newsletter online if you add their archive shortcode to your newsletter template. There is no need to host the newsletter on your own website.

The archive link normally appears at the top of each newsletter, prompting people to read the email in their browser if they're having problems with it in their email client. This link is private and will only be shared with people who've received the email. Anyone can visit that page if they have the link, but only people on your mailing list should know the URL.

You can further protect your previous newsletter content by turning off MailChimp's archive. See "Prevent People From Viewing Past Issues..." on this page: "Can I turn off the archive...?"

...or use WordPress' password protection

If you absolutely have to include the newsletter content in WordPress, you could password protect the post and include the password in the email. This is no different from having a private link to an archived copy of the email hosted with MailChimp, in practise, because anyone who might share the link to the archived copy might also share the password.

...or consider removing the archive link altogether

You can also remove the archive link altogether from your MailChimp newsletters, then simply test your campaign designs as thoroughly as possible (using Inbox Inspector).

Fully protecting content that you're sending out by email will be difficult; you can't easily prevent people forwarding newsletters or sharing links to archived versions. The best you can do is to make sure archived copies aren't indexed by Google and that the links only appear in the newsletters themselves.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Berumen354

The main problem you will faced is that you can't really determine if your user come from the email (ie: from gmail, yahoo, sparrow, outlook, etc ..) or something else. The referer, which can really help for this kind of restriction, can't be used because it will be empty (for dedicated client: outlook, lotus note, etc ..).

Does your email is personalized for each person? I mean, does it mention "Hi James", or refer to user action on your website? If not, you can put a link to the newsletter which will be the same for every user who whill receive the email. Then, you don't need to attach any specific link for unsubscribe for example.

If you don't want to appear on Google Search, just disallow search engine using robots.txt for this specific folder (or pages). It will be ok.

One other way is to force user to login on your website to be able to see the newsletter.

If you can do that, you will still faced problem when user forward the email to one other person or if it share it on the web.

Edit:

If you want to avoid content to be searchable:


a correct robots.txt to avoid crawling
no-index meta tags to avoid indexation


And the best option is to use an authentication system for each user. Could be email/email as login/password. I don't know how it can be easily integrated into WordPress.

Vote Up Vote Down