BD Subscription Mailer

Lightweight automated emails for WooCommerce Subscriptions sites. Replaces AutomateWoo for three workflows:

1. Task Reminder — an email after each successful subscription payment (per-product, toggleable per site).
2. Failed Payment Sequence — a six-message dunning sequence scheduled from the failure date, auto-cancelled on recovery.
3. Card Expiry Warnings — 45 / 20 / 7 day warnings before a stored card expires.

All scheduling uses Action Scheduler (bundled with WooCommerce) — no wp-cron jobs. All sending uses wp_mail(), so it works with WP Mail SMTP + Postmark out of the box. HPOS compatible.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.4+, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions
• PHP 8.1+ (tested on 8.3 / 8.4)

Installation

1. Upload bd-subscription-mailer.zip via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin (or unzip into wp-content/plugins/).
2. Activate BD Subscription Mailer.
3. Go to WooCommerce → BD Subscription Mailer to configure.

Activation creates two tables ({prefix}bdSM_log, {prefix}bdSM_expiry_sent) and schedules the daily 7:00am UTC card-expiry job.

Updates

The plugin auto-updates from GitHub releases via the bundled Plugin Update Checker. When a new release is published at bluedognz/bd-subscription-mailer, every site shows the update on Dashboard → Updates / Plugins like any other plugin (the zip attached to the release is what gets installed). Only the first install is manual.

To publish an update: bump the Version header, commit, push, tag (e.g. v1.2.1) and create a GitHub release with the plugin zip attached.

Optional, avoids GitHub API rate limits on sites that check frequently — add to wp-config.php:

define( 'BDSM_GH_TOKEN', 'ghp_yourtoken' );

Toggling features per site

Under the Settings tab:

Each CC field is independent — leave any of them empty for no CC. If a CC address matches the email's main recipient it is skipped to avoid duplicates.

Failed Payment and Card Expiry are always active while the plugin is enabled.

Editing email content

Each feature tab has WordPress TinyMCE editors:

Each email panel on these tabs can be collapsed/expanded by clicking its header (or the arrow), with Expand all / Collapse all links at the top — handy when managing many emails at once.

• Task Reminder — every published subscription product is listed. Tick the checkbox to enable it, then set a subject and body. Only ticked products trigger emails. A product with no body content is skipped (and logged).
• Failed Payment — six messages, each with subject, body and an editable delay in days (measured from the original failure timestamp, defaults 1 / 2 / 4 / 7 / 8 / 38). Messages 1–4 always go to the customer. Messages 5–6 have an editable internal recipient field (falls back to the site admin email if empty) — the customer is never sent these.
• Card Expiry — three emails (45, 20, 7 days before expiry), each with subject and body.

Changing a delay only affects sequences scheduled after the save; already-queued emails keep their original send time (cancel them on the Queue tab if needed).

Test emails

Every editor has a Send test email box underneath it: enter an address and click the button. The test uses whatever is currently in the editor (no need to save first), fills all template tags with sample data, prefixes the subject with [TEST], and sends only to that address — CC settings are not applied.

Template tags

Type tags directly into subjects or bodies; they're replaced at send time.

Task Reminder: {customer_first_name} {subscription_id} {product_name} {support_link} {site_name}

Failed Payment (customer, #1–4): {customer_first_name} {customer_email} {subscription_id} {order_total} {payment_update_link} {site_name} {customer_domain}

Failed Payment (team, #5–6): {customer_first_name} {customer_email} {subscription_id} {order_total} {customer_domain} {site_name} {days_overdue}

Card Expiry: {customer_first_name} {customer_email} {card_expiry_month} {card_expiry_year} {payment_update_link} {site_name}

Notes:

• {customer_domain} reads the customer_domain (or _customer_domain) meta on the subscription; blank if not set.
• {payment_update_link} is the subscription's change-payment-method URL (falls back to the My Account view-subscription URL).
• {days_overdue} is whole days since the original payment failure.

How the logic works

Task Reminder fires on woocommerce_subscription_payment_complete, only for enabled products. If the payment is a recovery (the plugin flagged a prior failure on that subscription), the reminder is skipped and logged as skipped.

Failed Payment fires on woocommerce_subscription_payment_failed and queues all six messages from the failure timestamp. Before each send, the subscription is re-checked:

• payment recovered (active again) → remaining emails cancelled silently;
• subscription cancelled/expired → remaining emails cancelled. A successful payment also cancels the queue immediately. A repeat failure restarts the sequence from the new failure date.

Card Expiry runs daily at 7:00am UTC, on active subscriptions only. Expiry is read from the customer's saved payment token (WC_Payment_Tokens) — where WooCommerce and the Stripe gateway actually store it — preferring the token the subscription pays with, then the customer's default card, then their most recent card. Order meta (_stripe_card_expiry_month / _stripe_card_expiry_year, then _payment_method_expiry_date as MM/YY, MM/YYYY or YYYY-MM) is used as a fallback. Subscriptions with no card data, and non-card tokens, are skipped. Sent warnings are recorded per subscription and card expiry date in bdSM_expiry_sent, so duplicates are impossible but a newly saved card gets a fresh set of warnings. If a tier's exact day was missed (site offline etc.), the most urgent applicable warning is sent on the next run instead of being lost.

Subscription watchdog

A self-contained module (includes/class-bd-watchdog.php) that recovers subscriptions which were paid but left stuck on-hold — typically a Stripe webhook race or a stale cache that stopped the status update firing.

• Runs on its own recurring 30-minute Action Scheduler job (same scheduler and group as the email jobs; visible on the Queue tab).
• Each run scans up to 50 on-hold subscriptions, skips any whose latest order is under 15 minutes old, and looks for a renewal order marked completed/processing and paid within the last 6 hours. Matches are switched to active with an audit note.
• When anything is fixed it emails a diagnostic report to admin_email (filter bd_watchdog_alert_email to redirect) and logs a warning to WooCommerce → Status → Logs under source bd-subscription-watchdog.

No new tables, no settings — it just runs. It requires WooCommerce Subscriptions (guarded) and is scheduled/cleared automatically on plugin activation/deactivation.

Copying content between sites

The Export / Import tab moves email content between sites without retyping. Export produces a Base64 string covering the Failed Payment emails, the Card Expiry emails, and (optionally on import) the support link + CC addresses. Paste it into the Import box on the other site and tick which sections to apply — leave Settings unticked to keep that site's own CC addresses.

Task Reminder content is deliberately excluded: it is keyed by product ID, which differs per site. The plugin-enable and Task Reminder toggles are never imported either, so a site's on/off state is always preserved.

Cards tab

A read-only overview of every active subscription and the card it will be charged against, resolved with the same lookup the daily job uses — so it doubles as a diagnostic. Shows brand/last4, expiry, days remaining, a colour-coded status (Expired / Critical / Warning / Due soon / OK), and which warning tiers have already been sent. Rows are sorted soonest-first.

A subscription showing "No card data" can never receive a warning — that's the first thing to check if expiry emails aren't arriving.

Each row shows where its expiry came from: live from Stripe, saved token (snapshot), or order meta. This matters — WooCommerce stores the card details captured when the token was saved, and Stripe silently updates reissued cards via the Visa/Mastercard account updater, so the local snapshot drifts out of date. Refresh card data from Stripe pulls live expiry dates for all active subscriptions (read-only, sends no emails); the daily job refreshes them automatically too. Requires a secret key in the WooCommerce Stripe settings — without one, a warning is shown and the local snapshot is used.

Rows marked "Stale — card replaced" had a successful payment after their stated expiry, which proves the stored date is fiction. These are never emailed.

The Run expiry check now button executes the daily job immediately (it sends real emails to anyone currently due; already-sent warnings are never repeated).

Log & Queue

• Log — last 200 events (sent / skipped / cancelled) with date, feature, customer, subscription and message number. Clear button included. The table self-trims to 1,000 rows.
• Queue — pending Action Scheduler actions created by this plugin only. Cancel a single queued email, or every queued email for a subscription ID at once.

Uninstall

Deleting the plugin (not just deactivating) runs uninstall.php, which drops both custom tables, deletes all plugin options and meta, and removes every scheduled action in the plugin's Action Scheduler group.

File structure

bd-subscription-mailer/
├── bd-subscription-mailer.php        Main plugin file / bootstrap
├── uninstall.php                     Full cleanup on delete
├── readme.md
├── includes/
│   ├── bdsm-functions.php            Helpers, defaults, settings access
│   ├── class-bdsm-install.php        Tables, activate/deactivate
│   ├── class-bdsm-logger.php         bdSM_log table
│   ├── class-bdsm-mailer.php         Tag replacement + HTML wp_mail()
│   ├── class-bdsm-task-reminder.php  Feature 1
│   ├── class-bdsm-failed-payment.php Feature 2
│   └── class-bdsm-card-expiry.php    Feature 3
├── admin/
│   ├── class-bdsm-admin.php          Menu, tabs, save/cancel handlers
│   └── views/                        One view per tab
└── templates/
    └── email-wrapper.php             HTML email shell (edit to restyle)