Dealbreakers

Hi,

I understand custom fields can be a little tricky to setup. We have an addon planned for it that will add a graphical interface for creating them.

For the rest:

1. E-mail piping has nothing to do with e-mail delivery. E-mail piping is inbound e-mails, while e-mail delivery is outbound e-mails. Those are completely different and unrelated.
2. E-mail delivery issues have nothing to do with our plugin. It has to do with hosting servers that are bad at e-mail delivery (and it’s ok because it’s not their job). If you’re just sending a couple a not so important e-mails sometimes it’s fine, but if you need to deliver a lot of important messages (like support notifications) then you need something more reliable than the hosting server mail server. Absolutely not related to the plugin.
3. I didn’t know Mandrill stopped their free plan. Thanks for reporting it. As explained in the docs, you can use MailGun instead. Maybe we should write a tutorial on how to use their service. They still have 10k free e-mails per month.

In conclusion, none of the problems (except the custom fields GUI) is related to Awesome Support directly.

SendGrid is another option. Still free.

I disagree, Julien. You could program the plugin to use SMTP authentication using the server’s outgoing mail system which would greatly improve delivery reliability instead of your current method. What you’re doing is asking people to use a third party service to make your plugin work reliably, since email notifications are (as you point out) an absolutely critical component of the plugin. If there is a problem with emails being delivered then instead of having one or two places to troubleshoot we add in another.

With your existing solution or your Mailgun solution your users are likely to get a “VIA” added to their “From” fields on Google mail servers (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en). We did, and it’s part of the reason our Emails were being sent to SPAM by Google and we think it looks unprofessional.

Believe me, I know how much work goes into these things. I know how much more complicated it would be to add in more email delivery functionality, but I think it would be a great improvement. Thanks as always and best of luck with the plugin!

You could program the plugin to use SMTP authentication using the server’s outgoing mail system which would greatly improve delivery reliability instead of your current method.

Imagine if you had to enter and maintain SMTP details in every mail-sending plugin on your system. There could be dozens and that would be horrible. That’s why the WordPress framework has the wp_mail function. The caller of the function (e.g. Awesome Support) uses this function. The owner of the function (you) makes sure it works correctly, by using the WordPress default settings or overriding them with an SMTP plugin.

If there is a problem with emails being delivered then instead of having one or two places to troubleshoot we add in another.

This is exactly why you use an SMTP plugin – a single spot to diagnose email issues.

it’s part of the reason our Emails were being sent to SPAM by Google and we think it looks unprofessional.

How you choose to send mail is up to you. If you choose a free service, you get what you pay for. If you choose a commercial service like Google Apps, you wouldn’t worry about looking unprofessional.

Jason, I can’t thank you enough for answering. I couldn’t have answered better. Thanks, really.

One small addition though, we’ll update the documentation accordingly to the latest change in Mandrill policy (no more free plan).