Wordpress Website outbound email sending
How does my Wordpress site send outbound emails?
On most shared hosting you will find that you don’t have an email solution automatically provided for your website. WordPress site requires transactional emails for it to be fully functional. A third party SMTP solution is required to send administrative emails, at the very least.
- How are outbound emails sent?
- What is sendgrid?
- Do emails get sent on staging?
- How do I see an email log?
- no-reply from address
- Domain authentication / DKIM
How are outbound email sent?
At SixFive we implement this for you using SendGrid as part of your account.
What is SendGrid?
SendGrid is an outbound email provider. It does not receive emails, only help emails from applications get to the destination.
How does my website use Sendgrid?
We install by default the Fluent SMTP plugin on your site configured with the base PHP Mail configuration. This is not required, but provides two advantages:
- You are able to access the email log to see your outbound email's
- If Sendgrid isn't working for you, for some reason you can configure your own provider, such as the easy to use Postmark
On the server we route the normal php_mail() through to SendGrid automagically.
Why is the from address always no-reply@mydomain.com?
We configure this by default because usually emails from Wordpress are not from a human, thus no-reply is the normal practice for these types of emails.
Do you authenticate my domain for email delivery?
Yes, outbound emails from any system are now required to be authenticated to help avoid being caught in spam folders. The authentication on your domain ensures that our server is allowed to send emails using your domain, and that they have a good chance of arriving in the inbox of the recipient.
What DNS records are required?
Sendgrid provides three records to add:
- emxxx.yourdomain.com CNAME u15446934.wl185.sendgrid.net
- s1._domainkey.yourdomain.com CNAME s1.domainkey.u15446934.wl185.sendgrid.net
- s1._domainkey.yourdomain.com CNAME s1.domainkey.u15446934.wl185.sendgrid.net
The first one changes depending on your configuration.
We will configure these for you when we have access to your DNS / Cloudflare Account.
Can I use another method to send emails?
Yes you can. We'd recommend you simply add the provider within Fluent SMTP plugin settings.
Note you should not use your normal Gmail or Outlook account as this punches a significant security hole in your email system. For example if your website were to get hacked and they were able to get the keys to your Gmail or Outlook - imagine how much damage they could do!
We already use SendGrid in the business
Not a problem, you can simply generate an new API key in SendGrid and insert that into Fluent SMTP, and disable the "PHP mail()" provider we configure for you.
Do emails get sent on staging?
By default, our staging sites do not send emails for safety. How embarrassing would it be if you accidentally et a password reset to a client or a mass email about a feature that isn't live yet!?
You can view emails sent using the email log.
Email Log
The Fluent SMTP plugin has an email log showing you all the emails the system generated, and gives you options to re-send them, or the error if they failed.
Navigate to Fluent SMTP > Email Log to view this.
