Hi @donniepeters my only solution was switching to an alternative SMTP plugin. I chose the most popular other one which allowed convenient import/migration of the smtp settings but lacks logging. Luckily there is a second plugin by the same author (!) specially for mail logging 😉
Thanks for reaching out @donniepeters. Appreciate the context and additional details regarding your setup and experience. We are working on a solution for this whereby I added your own report in there. While I’ll chase up regarding when a fix is expected, I’ll perform some checks on this. Can you share what the mailer option you selected within Post SMTP?
Thread Starter
Ron
(@donniepeters)
Hi @jamesosborne
Not quite sure what you are looking for but in Post SMTP in the Settings panel>Connections under Transport I have chosen the “Gmail Api” for Type (as we use Google Workspace) and Mailer Type is set for PostSMTP and not the only other option of Phpmailer.
We do not use a Fallback.
Under Message we do NOT have “Prevent plugins and themes from changing this” checked.
A few hours after the Monthly Site Kit report came out in raw HTML we had an email from our Wordfence Plugin sent by the same mailer in HTML and it was received properly.
When I went in to the Post SMTP Log and clicked on the “View” for the email sent by Site Kit it appeared in proper form and not as code. Also when I clicked the “Print” function from the “View” popup it was able to print properly and not in code.
When I compare the “Transcript” of two emails one from Site Kit plugin and one from the Wordfence plugin I see the following differences up to the <head> (left out sections that were the same):
Site Kit email:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
<!doctype html>=0A<html xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v= =3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:= office:office">=0A
Wordfence email:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.= org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">=0A<html xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org= /1999/xhtml">=0A
I hope this helps. I have 6 WordPress websites that I manage for clients and all have Site Kit and Post SMTP mailer. At the moment only the one that is on Google Workspace has the Monthly Report set up. I do not want to change the Mailer Plugin for all of them.
Appreciate the update @donniepeters. I configured a test site and I can confirm the same, regardless of whether PostSMTP or PHPMailer is the type applied. I did also test other configurations, while discussing this with the team, in particular any updates to the mentioned GitHub issue. From doing this, this isn’t specifically a Site Kit issue, with more details here. Regardless, we may be able to make some improvements within Site Kit to lower such instances, but this is still being reviewed as there may be regressions elsewhere. Ideally a fix would be applied from the POST SMTP side.
Luckily, rather than waiting for any resolution on this, there is a workaround which I tried and tested on a couple of sites. Post SMTP to have a HTML email add on – taken from this support topic. When enabled on my sites sites, emails are formatted and deleted in HTML format. Can you try this and confirm all is working as expected?
If the same does occur with the HTML email add on provided by Post SMTP, you may also wish to reach out to their team regarding this. An explanation of the cause can be found here. Do let me know how you get on with the above regardless.
Note: I’m sure you’re aware, but to install that add on, download the zip file and install using the upload plugin method, before activating.
Thread Starter
Ron
(@donniepeters)
@jamesosborne thanks for the update. Since we only have the issue with the Site Kit Monthly report that recently launched and the mailer plugin has work perfectly on all other emails generated from our website in HTML format …. and on all the other sites I manage, we will simply advise NOT using the Site Kit monthly report… in particular on the WordPress website for the Google Workspace user accounts. Hopefully none of the other Google products that are part of their plan develop failures like this product.
We look forward to fixing your plugin to work properly in a timely manner… which we have used on multiple websites since it first launched as it helped tie in access to Google Search, Analytics and Google Ad accounts for each website.
Other than using high resources when we open the backend Admin panels and the Site Kit widgets regularly fail to load as they exceed our resource limits… the Site Kit has work well and offers immediate and easy to understand data that Analytics has now made more challenging to view easily.
Please fix the plugin to work properly and maybe take the time to reach out to the Post SMTP folks to share your suggestion on how they can help you deliver reports that are actually usable.
I’ll certainly pass on your feedback @donniepeters, thanks for sharing. Glad to hear that you’re using Site Kit for multiple sites too.
We do plan on having an update with the next version of Site Kit set for 2 weeks time, which will ensure email reports do appear in HTML format for any plugins such as Post SMTP that register their own wp_mail() function before WordPress core. I’ll let you know as soon as this is shipped.
Other than using high resources when we open the backend Admin panels and the Site Kit widgets regularly fail to load as they exceed our resource limits… the Site Kit has work well and offers immediate and easy to understand data that Analytics has now made more challenging to view easily.
If you wish for us to look into or investigate any issues you may be facing specifically with wp-admin performance or resource issues, feel free to open individual support topic and we can do so. There are individual Google API limits per request that users can indeed reach, which isn’t something we can directly control, as these are API write limits.
Regarding performance, we do bundle requests, cache responses, and limit requests to the Site Kit dashboard. If you’re finding anything unusual we can certainly investigate this further. Thank you.
Thread Starter
Ron
(@donniepeters)
Thanks @jamesosborne
I like the idea of having the Monthly reports generated from within WordPress.
My comment about the failure to load happens on many of the websites I manage, who are in individual hosting accounts… though at this time they are all on Hosting.com (formerly A2Hosting) and it may be the quality of their service as they have not adapted to the huge increase in bots now hitting most sites, which takes some resources away. But on almost all of them I have to hit the red “Retry” button on the Dashboard to get them to load a block of info.
Thanks for your suggestion though.
The evidence points to an email MIME/header problem, not the email client.
Your transcript difference is the key:
Site Kit email:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Working HTML email:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
So the HTML body is being delivered, but the mail pipeline is labeling it as plain text.
Check in this order:
- Test the Post SMTP HTML add-on/workaround on one affected site only.
- Do not migrate all sites or change SMTP plugin globally until one test confirms it.
- Compare headers for Site Kit vs Wordfence after the workaround.
- Keep Site Kit monthly reports disabled on client sites until the fix ships, if the report renders raw HTML.
The issue is not whether Gmail/Thunderbird can render HTML. They can. The wrong Content-Type is telling them not to.
