One of the most useful situations, but at the same time less accurate than a site created with WordPress, is linked to the management of automatically sent emails which often unfortunately end up in the recipients’ spam .
This happens especially to those websites that need to send many notifications to their users, first of all the e-commerce situations come to mind that, with each new order / registration, send a confirmation email to the user and that ends up in the Junk Mail. We also do not forget the notifications sent to users when they publish new posts, new comments, newsletters (although it is not a good idea to use WordPress directly to manage the newsletter), etc.
For all these reasons it is important to configure the WordPress SMTP server to use a third party outgoing mail service.
Why do emails end up in spam?
First of all you need to understand the reasons why an email sent by WordPress ends up in junk mail.
Often the problem is related to the WordPress SMTP server (it would be better to say to the IP of the server) on which our website resides.
Most of the hosting services that we are used to seeing around, offer (at very low costs) a hosting space for our “shared” site . What does this mean? It means that on the same server with a unique IP address, there are dozens (not to mention thousands) of other websites. So far it can also be, given the very low costs I see around.
The problem arises when among our “roommates” there are sites that take advantage of all possible bandwidth resources , or unsafe websites that can be victims of hackers who “steal” their space and resources or worse still use them as servers to send spam . Other times instead, the same owners of the websites hosted on our own server can personally commit unorthodox actions of DEM (direct email marketing) to the limit of spam.
All these reasons create 2 problems for us:
- at peak times, but not only, our site is often very slow due to the bottlenecks of our “roommates”.
- The IP address of the shared server (the same as ours) ends up in the blacklist of email providers , with the consequence that all emails marked with the same IP address will be reported as SPAM.
Do I have to buy a dedicated server?
That being said, the most logical solution could be to buy a dedicated hosting service , that is, where only your sites are hosted on the server, lowering the risk of being banned, but going against much higher costs: a fairly good service can have a monthly cost that can range from € 9 a month upwards.
Configure the outgoing mail server (WordPress SMTP)
To get around this without spending a lot, my advice is to configure anexternal SMTP service , so that all emails sent through our WordPress SMTP are not sent directly from our server, but pass through a mass emailing manager , created specifically to send emails with “clean” (and often dedicated) IP.
When it comes to e-mail, the first service that comes to mind is Gmail . Without taking anything away from others, as far as I’m concerned Gmail is the best email service I’ve ever had and everyone should have an account if they never want to lose an email.
For this reason the SMTP service offered by Gmail becomes the first useful option, so thanks to this plugin configure our WordPress to make sure that you send emails with our Gmail account, it becomes possible as well as free !
Attention, because configuring this service is not easy , in fact there is a need to do an authentication procedure through the Google Developer service, but I must say that thanks to the guide made available by the developers of the plugin , which explains step by step how to proceed, it becomes much much simpler. The best alternative.
Mailgun
Mailgun is a service for mass mailing created specifically for developers that thanks to its powerful API allows you to send, receive and track e-mails effortlessly. This powerful service is obviously also paid, but it gives us the possibility to open a free account to send up to 10,000 free emails every month, I would say not bad.
With this plugin we can easily configure this powerful service on our WordPress SMTP and choose to use the API services or simply the SMTP service . Very good.
MailJet
Mailjet is presented as a marketing newsletter service and in fact among the main services we find: creation of email campaigns, list management, automation and even even an SMS sending service.
However, in this article, we have analyzed only the SMTP aspect and the APIs of this service which was very effective, even if not at the same level as the others. Even Mailjet is a premium service, but with the possibility of creating a free account that will allow us to send 6000 emails per month (200 per day) which in most cases are more than enough.
For this service, the developers have created an official WordPress plugin , very, very simple to use, even it will only be necessary to enter the username and password and all Mailjet features will be integrated into our site. Well done.
SendGrid
SendGrid is perhaps one of the services to send the oldest and most known mass mail , definitely scalable and reliable . Among the services offered by this platform, in addition to the SMTP service, we also find all the services dedicated to email marketing: list management, campaign management, creation of A / B tests, statistics and customizable templates.
Like the other services, SendGrid also has a free plan that allows us to send 40000 emails for the first 30 days and then 100 emails per day forever . Knowing the service I have to say that if your volume is among the 100 daily emails, SendGrid is definitely for you, and if you decide to buy a paid plan you will certainly not regret it . Money well spent.
Here too the developers have worked to release an official plugin that makes life easy for those who want to use the service through their WordPress site, easy to configure and use.
Conclusion
There are many online services for managing the outgoing mail server, many free and many others for a fee. Certainly there are other better services than those present in this article, indeed I invite you to report the SMTP service that you use .
The ones I proposed are the ones I have had the pleasure of personally using over the years, those that currently work on my clients’ sites and do it excellently.
Posted by: Web Digital Media Group
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