WP Mail SMTP Plugin | A Simple Beginners Guide On How It Works

Basically, the WP Mail SMTP fixes your email deliverability by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider when sending emails. Having problems with your WordPress site not sending emails? You’re not alone.

Eventually, over 1 million websites use WP Mail SMTP to send their emails reliably. And the main goal is to make email deliverability easy and reliable. In the end, ensure your emails reach the inbox on time.

In general, there are various WP Mail SMTP plugins you can use to force any FROM address you like. This is important for two major reasons.

It allows you;

• Send email directly through your mail server as opposed to the webserver. This helps to prevent issues with Sender Domain Policy and Spoofing.
• In sending an email FROM another email host. For example, you can use your GMAIL address as the FROM email instead of your DreamHost address.

One popular plugin option is WP Mail SMTP.

But, important to realize, the WP Mail SMTP plugin was originally created by Callum Macdonald. It is now owned and maintained by the team behind WPForms – the best drag & drop form builder for WordPress.

How is WP Mail SMTP Plugin useful?

Have you noticed that most popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc allow users to log in with email or their username? Want to add the same functionality on your site?  By default, WordPress requires every user to provide an email address. So, you already have that on file.

Now let’s take a look at the benefits of allowing users to log in with their username or email in WordPress. And one word for that is usability.

To enumerate, Emails are more personal than usernames especially if the username is taken. An average user has different variations of their usernames on different websites. By adding a login option with email or username, you make it easy for users in case they forgot their username.

The WP Mail SMTP Plugin is useful if your site is a membership site or has tons of users because most folks don’t forget their email addresses.

What’s the Meaning of SMTP?

By definition, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an industry-standard for sending emails. Whereby, proper SMTP configuration helps increase email deliverability by using authentication.

Popular email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and Office 365 are in a constant battle with email spammers. One of the things they look at is if an email is originating from the location it claims to be originating from.

If the proper authentication isn’t there, then emails either go in the SPAM folder or worst, don’t get delivered at all. After all, this is a problem for a lot of WordPress sites because, by default, WordPress uses the PHP mail function to send emails generated by WordPress. Or any contact form plugin like WPForms.

The issue is that most WordPress hosting companies don’t have their servers properly configured for sending PHP emails. So, the combination of two causes your WordPress emails not to get delivered.

How does the WP Mail SMTP work?

Notably, the WP Mail SMTP plugin easily resolves email delivery problems by improving and changing how your WordPress site sends the email. They’ll reconfigure the wp_mail() function to either make use of a proper SMTP host credentials or rather, leverage a built-in SMTP mail provider.

When using one of the built-in SMTP mail provider integrations (recommended), emails are sent using the provider’s direct API. Meaning, even if your web host is blocking SMTP ports, your emails still send successfully.

Not forgetting, this helps you fix all WordPress not sending email issues. However, the WP Mail SMTP plugin includes many different SMTP setup options.

SMTP Setup Options Include:

1. Sendinblue SMTP (Recommended)
2. Mailgun SMTP
3. SendGrid SMTP
4. Gmail SMTP
5. Microsoft SMTP (Outlook.com and Office 365) [Pro]
6. Amazon SES SMTP [Pro]
7. All Other SMTP

For all options, you can specify the “from name” and “email address” for outgoing emails.

Instead of having users use different SMTP plugins and workflows for different SMTP providers, they decided to bring it all in one.

Above all, this is what makes WP Mail SMTP, the best SMTP solution for WordPress.

Sendinblue SMTP

Sendinblue is the topmost recommended transactional email service. Not to mention, they serve 80,000+ growing companies around the world and send over 30 million emails each day.

Their email deliverability experts are constantly at work optimizing the reliability and speed of their SMTP infrastructure. Sendinblue provides users 300 free emails per day.

Read the Sendinblue documentation for more details.

Mailgun SMTP

Mailgun SMTP is a popular SMTP service provider that allows you to send large quantities of emails. They allow you to send your first 10,000 emails for free every month.

WP Mail SMTP plugin offers native integration with MailGun. All you have to do is connect your Mailgun account, and you will improve your email deliverability.

Read the Mailgun documentation for more details.

SendGrid SMTP

SendGrid has a free SMTP plan that you can use to send up to 100 emails per day.

With the native SendGrid SMTP integration, you can easily and securely set up SendGrid SMTP on your WordPress site.

Read the SendGrid documentation for more details.

Gmail SMTP

Often bloggers and small business owners don’t want to use third-party SMTP services. Well, you can use your Gmail or G Suite account for SMTP emails.

This allows you to use your professional email address and improve email deliverability.

Unlike other Gmail SMTP plugins, our Gmail SMTP option uses OAuth to authenticate your Google account, keeping your login information 100% secure.

Read the Gmail documentation for more details.

Microsoft SMTP (Outlook.com and Office 365)

Many businesses use Outlook.com or Office 365 in order to power their email. For those users, Microsoft mailer can be a great option.

This integration allows you to use your existing Outlook.com or Office 365 account to send your emails reliably.

Amazon SES SMTP

Advanced or technical users can harness the power of Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) with the Amazon SES mailer.

With this integration, you can send a high volume of emails at a very reasonable rate.

Read the Amazon SES documentation for more details.

Other SMTP

WP Mail SMTP plugin also works with all major email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Microsoft Live, and any other email sending service that offers SMTP.

You can set the following options:

• Specify an SMTP host.
• Specify an SMTP port.
• Choose SSL / TLS encryption.
• Choose to use SMTP authentication or not.
• Specify an SMTP username and password.

To see recommended settings for the popular services as well as troubleshooting tips, check out the SMTP documentation.

Having a reliable WordPress SMTP plugin is a good idea for any WP Site. These plugins allow the site admin to choose which SMTP service to use. And then again, bypasses the normal WordPress email functionality.

While an SMTP plugin can seem very technical, it is ideal for all types of WordPress users.

What’re the Features of WP Mail SMTP Pro?

Emails are the preferred method of transferring information online, and it makes sense that email would also be an essential part of running and managing a successful WordPress site.

SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is a simple communication protocol that allows the transfer of email over the internet. In addition to making your website’s email more secure, having the SMTP gateway helps prevent WordPress emails from being blocked by popular free email providers like Gmail.

Having said that, do you have a WordPress blog? If so you must face a problem with sending an email by your contact form. Yes! Of course, WordPress by default not sending you contact form email properly. If Although any type of contact forms. (Contact Form 7, WPForms, Ninja Forms, etc.)

As can be seen, WP Mail SMTP is the best solution to fix WordPress email delivery and be sure 100% emails reach the inbox! In addition to native Microsoft and Amazon SES integrations, WP Mail SMTP Pro provides access to many other powerful features and services.

The main features of WP Mail SMTP include;

Email Log

Surprisingly, Email Logging lets you log and view all emails sent from your site.

But, always remember, Email logs are helpful for storing emails for your records, auditing outgoing emails, and debugging during site development.

Manage WordPress Emails and Notifications

The Manage Notification feature gives you full control over which email notifications WordPress sends. This means you can disable different WordPress notification emails. Don’t want to receive emails when new users are created? No problem, turn it off.

Expert Support

We provide limited support for the WP Mail SMTP plugin on the WordPress.org forums. Access to our world-class one-on-one email support is available to WP Mail SMTP Pro users.

White-Glove Setup

Our White Glove Setup service is a great option that anyone can benefit from. Whether you don’t have the time or maybe you feel a bit in over your head – we’ve got you covered.

You can sit back and relax while we set up everything for you. White glove setup includes WP Mail SMTP plugin installation and setup, configuration adjustments to your DNS for proper email domain name verification, Mailgun setup, and final testing to confirm everything is passing with flying colors.

Security

The WP Mail SMTP team takes security very seriously. Not only does the plugin follow all security best practices, but we have several options available to ensure your site is safe and secure.

• Direct SMTP mailer integrations (recommended), such as Google and Mailgun, use the official provider APIs. This means you never enter your username or password in the plugin settings and these credentials are not stored in the database. Instead, we use tokens or API keys which are much more secure.
• When using Other SMTP mailers, we provide the option to insert your password in your wp-config.php file, so it’s not visible in your WordPress settings or saved in the database.

You can try the free version of the WPForms plugin to see why it’s the best in the market.

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Read Also: How to Fix WordPress Not Sending Email Issue

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Resourceful References;

With this in mind, I hope the above WordPress Plugin Guide was helpful towards your Email Login Setup. But, if you’ll have more personalized questions, suggestions or even contributions, please Contact Us. In addition, you can share your thoughts as well in the comments box.

Finally, below are more useful and related to the topic links;

1. How do I send PHP mail via SMTP?
2. Troubleshooting WordPress contact forms
3. Click here to Purchase the WP SMTP Pro now!
4. How to Install a WordPress Plugin – Step-by-step
5. Troubleshooting GMAIL SMTP authentication errors