Confusing

Hi @maurshea,

Thanks for leaving your feedback and I apologize for the frustration!

In case it helps, I’d like to share more details about why an SMTP plugin is the only way to improve email delivery from your WordPress website.

First, it’s important to know what happens to emails and why they might not get delivered. I’ve included a great video that explains this.

For a quick reference, I’ve included the gist of what the video discusses below.

There are a few reasons why an email could not be delivered including:

1. If you’re sending emails via a server’s PHP mail function and the PHP mail function is blocked by the receiving server (some hosts do this by default for security reasons).
2. If the server IP has been flagged as spam by various email servers then those servers will start to reject emails coming from your server so it will appear as if the emails are not getting delivered at all. This typically happens if you are using a shared hosting server (several websites share a single server from a hosting provider) because when a site on that server is flagged for spam then the entire server is flagged.

Additionally, emails from a WordPress website (such as form notification emails) are sent through the PHPMailer (I’ve also included a short article on this here). In such cases, your email reputation is based on your server and the various records that are set up on the server (SPF, DMARC, etc).

Sending an email via SMTP will authenticate the email by checking things like the email header, the content of the email, any links included in an email, etc. By going through this authentication process, emails sent through SMTP are much more likely to be delivered to their final destination.

We have a great guide that takes you through setting up SMTP here.

In case it helps to share, the WP Mail SMTP plugin mentioned in that guide does have a free version that you could download to try out and they offer limited support for the free version on their WordPress support forum.

I hope this helps clarify why setting up an SMTP plugin on WordPress sites helps to improve email delivery.

Please feel free to reach out with any other questions!

Thanks!