Webhost does not offer phpMail() – Alternatives?

  • Resolved more.than.obsidian

    (@morethanobsidian)


    10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi, I’m still pretty new to wordpress and programming in general, so please don’t feel offended if I’m actually posting a stupid question…

    I’m now trying my blog on a free web hosting, as I am still not sure whether I want to do this for the long term. I want to set up, however, an email form service so that people can contact me through this form on the website. When someone fills out the form and clicks send, the form would say that everything’s sent out fine. However, this mail would never arrive at my Gmail account because this free hosting service (Byethost) does not offer phpMail() service. (I first knew about this after filing this problem as a ticket.)

    Is there anyway to bypass this? Are there any WordPress plugins which could still send me / relay the message to me using some other functions or some other functions I need to tweak?

    The absolute last options for me would be
    1. to publish my email address on the website (which I’m afraid about spam problems), or
    2. to use GoogleForm (which I think cannot be disguised in a way which the user cannot know that it’s actually a GoogleForm) and reply with my normal email services.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • thewhiskytrials

    (@wptweaks)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi,

    What email form are you using. Have you tried any plugins that can utilise smtp sending like Contact Form 7?

    My advice would be to get paid hosting. Its only a few quid per year, check out The Path Hosting. £12 a year.

    Hope that helps.

    liquid-web-design-london

    (@liquid-web-design-london)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    I’d also use paid hosting – very cheap these days. There’s no such thing as free hosting.

    An alternative is to use something like Jotform: http://www.jotform.com/ & just embed the contact form.

    Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    Are there any WordPress plugins which could still send me / relay the message to me

    @morethanobsidian Of course. You want an SMTP plugin.
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/postman-smtp/

    to publish my email address on the website (which I’m afraid about spam problems)

    You want an email obfuscator.
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/graceful-email-obfuscation/

    I’m an author for both 😉

    There’s no such thing as free hosting.

    @liquid-web-design-london That’s an odd thing to say. I use OpenShift myself, but then I’m a developer.

    liquid-web-design-london

    (@liquid-web-design-london)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    I mean with freemium plans…you usually end up paying anyway to upgrade because of the limitations.

    Thread Starter more.than.obsidian

    (@morethanobsidian)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    @jason Hendriks:
    Thank you so much for the suggestion of your plugin Postman SMTP! It worked wonderfully and I can successfully bypass the phpMail()!! Thank you so much for the great plugin and it’s definitely a keeper for me!

    @wptweaks, @liquid-web-design-london:
    Thank you as well for your suggestions. I had been staying away from paid hosting services because almost all of them cost more than my planned budget for a blog just for fun. (I was thinking less than 15€ a year)
    But I was not aware that there’s an option being £12 a year, and I passed by some comments of users saying that my current free web hosting service sometimes cut down people’s blogs for no clear reason… So thanks for the suggestion, I have signed up for one year in The Path hosting to try it out. I hope it works fine 🙂

    Thread Starter more.than.obsidian

    (@morethanobsidian)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    @jason Hendriks:
    P.S. My friend also suggested me Openshift and it seemed like a very stable free host. However, it is a nightmare for absolute beginners with no background knowledge to programming or git. It would be a good choice for me should I ever figure out how git works 🙂

    Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    10 years, 9 months ago

    Their git support is fantastic for a custom PHP application – WordPress or other.

    What you want, as a non-techie, is to install the Managed WordPress application with the MySQL application – no programming knowledge necessary and the 1GB free service should be plenty for your needs. If you need SSL with a custom domain name, you can put a free service from Cloudflare in front of it.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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