Choose How To Send Your WordPress Website's Emails
MailPoet can send your website's emails instead so these emails are not sent from your host. This is a good practice for deliverability. MailPoet entirely replaces common "SMTP plugins".
Emails sent from your website are often called "transactional emails" since they're are pre formatted.
Quick links:
- How to enable it
- Important: protect your forms from bots
- What emails does WordPress send?
- Why would I change the default way of sending?
- What if I have an SMTP plugin already installed?
- Where can I see the log of transactional emails?
- Fallback in case your sending service is not available
- Attachments are not permitted
- We don't support CC, BCC or multiple TO
- FROM address will be overwritten
- Do spam complaints on third-party emails count against our MailPoet sending reputation?
How to enable the option
You can choose how to send all your website's emails in MailPoet Settings > Advanced > Send all site's emails with...
This will allow you to send your transactional emails with MailPoet's configured sending method, which can be:
- The MailPoet Sending Service
- Your host
- SMTP
- Amazon SES
- SendGrid
Important: protect your forms from bots
Bots love to target forms on WordPress websites, such as contact, comments & subscription forms. Many of these forms will send an email notification to the administrator of the site.
Problem: the email provider for this inbox, e.g. Gmail, can start marking these emails as spam because of the body of the email which is filled with spammy bot content.
Important recommendations:
- Protect all your forms (especially contact forms) against bots, by using reCaptcha. Check with your theme or form plugin's documentation on how to do this.
- In your inbox, never mark emails coming from your WordPress website as spam, even if the content is from a bot. You will degrade your own sending reputation.
What emails does WordPress send?
- Contact form submissions
- Password reset emails
- Comment notification emails
- Site, plugins and theme update notification emails
- New user welcome email and notification email (sent to admin)
- Invoices, new order, shipping confirmed and more for WooCommerce
Why would I change the default way of sending?
The short answer is because of email deliverability. If your emails arrive in the spam folder, you won't be able to solve this issue, unless you send with a professional service instead of your host.
What if I have an SMTP plugin already installed?
You will need to deactivate it first if you want MailPoet to set your preferred sending method. Unfortunately, we cannot override other plugins.
Where can I see the log of transactional emails?
MailPoet does not log these emails by default. You can use the free WP Mail Logging plugin to keep a log of all your emails by WordPress or WooCommerce. Opens and click rates are not tracked with this plugin.
Fallback mechanism in case your sending service is not available
Our plugin will send your transactional emails immediately, without being queued like other emails MailPoet sends (newsletter, welcome emails & post notifications).
If your sending service is a third party (for example SMTP or Amazon SES) and this method is temporarily not available, your transactional emails might be lost because they are not queued to try again if they fail to send the first time.
If you're sending with the MailPoet Sending Service and it is temporarily unavailable, MailPoet, the plugin, will fall back on sending all your transactional emails with your host as a safeguard.
Attachments are not permitted
When sending transactional emails with MailPoet's sending method, MailPoet does not include attachments in the emails that are sent because of bandwidth concerns and security implications with spam filters. Note that the attachments won't be sent if you're using a configured in MailPoet third-party sending method either.
We recommend sending links to files instead of attaching them to the email. If you need to send attachments for your transactional emails, you can use the default WordPress sending method.
We don't support CC, BCC or multiple TO
When sending transactional emails with MailPoet's sending method, an email will be sent to only one To
email address, meaning that multiple ones are not supported. Furthermore, the MailPoet sending method does not support CC or BCC.
FROM address will be overwritten
When sending transactional emails with the current sending method configured within MailPoet, MailPoet will overwrite the FROM address to the one set in MailPoet's settings > Default Sender.
If you want to keep the original FROM address for your transactional emails, you can use the default WordPress sending method.
Do spam complaints on third-party emails count against our MailPoet sending reputation?
Yes, if you are sending all of your site's emails via our MailPoet Sending Service, and a subscriber flags an email sent through our service as spam, then that would be considered the same as a spam complaint on one of your MailPoet Newsletters or other emails, per our Anti-Spam Policy. We have more information about this in our documentation here.