‘WP SMTP’ mailer allows you to send emails from any email address using standard SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). In this article, we’ll show you how to Configure the ‘WP Mail SMTP’ plugin to improve email delivery for your site.
What is WP Mail SMTP and why we need it?
WP Mail SMTP is the best WordPress SMTP plugin on the market. It allows you to easily send all your WordPress emails using an SMTP server.
After you set up your WordPress site, you may find that you are not receiving any emails from WordPress. This includes WordPress notification emails and emails from your WordPress contact form plugin.
The reason you are not receiving emails is that WordPress uses the PHP mail () function to send them. When sending emails from this PHP mail function, many emails are blacklisted. To avoid that situation, we disabled that mail function on our LankaHostMaster hosting sites, and instead, we use the MailChannels service. This WP Mail SMTP plugin helps to send or receive WordPress emails through MailChannels without being blacklisted.
SMTP stands for “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” and is pretty much the standard way of sending e-mail. Sending email requires you to log in to a mail server, which prevents abuse of the host server and improves email deliverability.
Installing and Configure WP Mail SMTP plugin
- Installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin
- Log in to the WordPress admin of your site
- In the left admin menu, click on Plugins, then click on Add New.
- In the search bar search for WP Mail SMTP.
- Click the Install button, then Activate.
- Once it’s installed and activated, go to the Plugins page in your WordPress dashboard.
- Click the Settings link under the plugin
- Configure on the settings page
Note: If you don’t have an email yet, make sure you have created an email address in your cPanel first.
- Navigate to the WP MAIL SMTP > Settings page.
- Fill in the following fields:
- From Email – Enter the email you wish to send FROM
- Force From Email – Check this box
- From Name – Enter a name you’d like to appear as being sent FROM
- Force From Name – Check this if you wish to force the FROM name
- Return Path – Check this box
- Under the Mailer section, choose Other SMTP
- Under the Other SMTP section. Make sure to toggle the Authentication button
- SMTP Host – Your mail server address
- Encryption – Use TLS encryption
- SMTP Port – 587
Note: In this example, port 587 is used with TLS. If you prefer to use port 465, be sure to use the SSL option instead.
- Username – Enter your email address
- Password – Enter your email address Password
- Click the Save Settings button.
- Testing the plugin
Now that all your SMTP settings are in place, the next step is to make sure everything is working correctly. To do so, go to WP Mail SMTP » Tools and click the Email Test tab.
In the Send To field, you can enter any email address that has access to the inbox. We recommend turning on the HTML settings unless you know you will only be sending plain text email.
Once you have filled in the required settings, go ahead and click the Send Email button to send your test email.
Once the test email has been sent, you should see a success message that reads “Success!” Test HTML email was sent successfully! Please check your inbox to make sure it was delivered.
