Automated Emails
This is the complete list of emails Benecaster sends on its own, what triggers each one, and who receives it. Emails Overview covers the three you’ll see most often in more depth; this page is the full catalog.
Most of these are sent by your own site, through your own SMTP connection — see SMTP Setup. A few come from benecaster.com instead, and those are listed separately at the end.
Subscriber Emails
These go to your subscribers. All of them are transactional — they’re sent because of something that happened to that person’s account, not as marketing.
| Sent when | Can be turned off | |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | A subscriber’s feed token is generated for the first time. Contains their private feed URL. | Per show |
| Token reset | A feed token is reset, whether by you or by the subscriber. Contains the new URL. | Per show |
| Tier change | A subscriber moves between tiers — upgrade, downgrade, or an admin change. | Per show |
| Donation thank-you | A listener logs a Listener Support donation. Only sent when a donor email address is available. | Per show (off by default) |
| Manual grant expired | Admin-comped access reaches its expiry date. Dispatched by the hourly manual-grant expiry cron. | — |
The welcome and token reset emails are the two that actually carry feed URLs, which makes them the ones worth protecting. If a subscriber says they never got their feed, that’s almost always one of these two — see Emails Not Sending.
Built-in Membership Emails
These only apply when you’re using Benecaster’s built-in membership rather than a third-party membership plugin. If a separate plugin handles your billing, that plugin sends its own billing email and Benecaster stays out of it.
| Sent when | Can be turned off | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription receipt | Each successful payment. | Per show |
| Renewal reminder | A configurable number of days before the billing period ends (default 7). | Per show |
| Payment failed | Once per payment retry cycle. | Per show |
| Cancellation confirmation | Immediately when a subscriber requests cancellation. | Per show |
| Subscription cancelled | At terminal cancellation — the billing period ended or all retries were exhausted. | Per show |
| Promote grace reminder | 6–8 days before a promoted subscriber’s token expires. | — |
| Promote grace expired | A promoted subscriber’s grace period ends and their token is revoked. | — |
See Billing Emails for what these contain.
Admin Emails
These go to your site’s admin address, not to subscribers. They’re never suppressed by the sending-rate throttle or by unsubscribe preferences — you always get them.
| Sent when | |
|---|---|
| Auto-upgrade fired | The daily validation cycle confirms a scheduled plan auto-upgrade took effect. |
Payment-failure emails are not sent from your site — see below.
Add-on Emails
These require an add-on. They aren’t sent, and don’t appear in your email settings, unless the add-on is active.
| Add-on | |
|---|---|
| Episode notification — a subscriber is told an episode is now available to their tier | Email Editor |
| Broadcast — a one-off message you compose and send to selected tiers | Email Editor |
| Analytics digest — daily, weekly, and monthly summaries | Analytics Dashboard |
Broadcasts are the only email in this entire catalog that is marketing rather than transactional, which is why they’re the only ones affected by unsubscribe preferences. See Unsubscribes.
Emails Benecaster Sends You From benecaster.com
Some emails come from Benecaster directly rather than from your WordPress site. These are dispatched by benecaster.com against your account, so they don’t pass through your SMTP connection, don’t appear in your email queue, and can’t be customized with templates or filters.
| Sent when | |
|---|---|
| Threshold warning | You’re approaching your plan’s subscriber limit. |
| Threshold crossed | You’ve passed the limit. |
| Plan changed | Your plan was upgraded or changed. |
| Downgrade available | Your subscriber count has been low enough, long enough, to move down a plan. |
| Payment failed | A renewal payment fails — opens a 30-day grace window. |
| Payment reminders | Day 10, day 20, and day 29 of that grace window, escalating as the deadline nears. |
| Access restored | Payment succeeds after the grace window has already expired and access was cut off. |
Why the payment emails come from benecaster.com rather than your site. They concern your Benecaster billing, not your podcast, so they’re sent to your account’s billing address from benecaster.com — which is what you’d expect when your Benecaster payment has a problem. It also means they still arrive if your site’s own email is misconfigured, which matters most precisely when billing is failing. And if you run several sites on one license, you get one email per event rather than one from every site.
Your site still handles what happens locally during a payment failure — which subscribers can reach which feeds, and restoring their access afterwards. See Payment Failure and Recovery.
Turning Emails Off
Per-show toggles live in Benecaster → Settings → Email. Turning an email off stops it for that show only — other shows on the same installation are unaffected.
Be careful with the welcome and token reset emails. They’re the delivery mechanism for feed URLs, so disabling them means taking on the job of getting URLs to subscribers yourself. Turn them off only if you have a deliberate replacement in place.
For finer control than an on/off switch — suppressing an email for certain subscribers, or sending it through a different service — use the benecaster_email_should_send filter described in Customizing Emails.