Solving Email Delivery Issues with a Third-Party Email Provider

If you are having email delivery issues or plan to send email blasts, you will need to configure third party email hosting with your WordPress site.

While we manage many parts of your website hosting, default E-Mail functionality on WP Farm is limited. Normal emails, such as password resets, will not typically have any issues sending. However, for robust email functionality, monitoring and scalability, we highly suggest utilizing a 3rd party email host.

Email Delivery Issues: Supported Email Ports

Our infrastructure providers do not allow mail to be sent over port 25. Any 3rd party provider must support sending emails over alternate ports or via an API.

• Port 2525 is recommended
• Ports 587 and 465 are allowed
• Microsoft Office 365 can only use port 587

Recommended Email Hosts

We typically recommend using a 3rd party transactional mail provider such as Mailgun, SendGrid, and Google Apps. These services allow you to send emails using their mail IPs and will include a higher level of customization, such as more robust logging.

If you need to send an email blast, you also want to ensure deliverability. Companies like MailChimp, Mandrill, and Constant Contact spend a great deal of time and resources managing their mail IPs. Ensuring email deliverability is one of their top priorities, just like managing your website performance is one of ours.

General SMTP Configuration

1. Sign up with your desired email host
2. Perform any necessary domain validation to activate their services
3. Install and activate a compatible SMTP plugin
   1. Email services that run using an API typically have their own plugin
   2. We recommend WP Mail SMTP or Postman for those that don’t
4. Your SMTP plugin options should appear similar to the following:

1. Fill in your SMTP options with the host, port, encryption, and authentication details provided by your email host
2. Save your changes

Email Limits and Blacklisting

Servers meant to host your website are not typically designed to also send large quantities of emails. It is possible for the server IP to become blacklisted by mail spam lists due to your site or any other sites hosted on the same server.

By default, WordPress also sends email using the PHP mail function. Emails sent using this could be rejected by inboxes that require an email to be sent from genuine SMTP servers.

For these reasons, if you find your IP has been placed on a mail blacklist or are having issues with emails sending, you will want to set up third party email hosting. This bypasses the server IP entirely when sending emails and also provides more control over spam preventative measures.

Many hosts, WP Farm included, impose a limit on the number of emails that can regularly be sent from a website. If a specific quantity of emails is required, third party email hosting will need to be configured to ensure deliverability.