Intrusive and bloated: It installs and activates other plugins

  • The plugin installs other plugins (WPForms) that are not requiered.

    it seems that during the wizard there is an already pre-checked checkbox wich doens’t states this will involve to install other plugins.

    So I had to take the time to deactivate – remove the other plugin, search for unauthorized admin logins, as i was afraid for such unrequested addition, then take the time to search what was the cause of this plugin installation, then write this review to warn other users about the intrusive behaviour of this plugin.

    The plugin works well, but is bloated with 5 unusable tabs demostrating the premium features, beside the “general” and “Misc” tab. This makes the plugin confusing for those administrators who search something simple, minimal and functional.

    Such practices decrease the reputation of the plugin and the company behind.

    • This topic was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by clip1492.
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  • Plugin Support Dake

    (@dakeg)

    Hi @clip1492

    Setup Wizard

    Thank you for sharing your honest feedback. We’re happy to hear that WP Mail SMTP is working well for you, but we do apologize for the confusion and extra steps that you had taken to confirm that the option to install WPForms or AIOSEO as additional plugins is only available while going through our Setup Wizard and only if those specific options are selected during the setup process.

    We intended to provide great starter tools for popular/related needs while keeping the option to uncheck or uninstall if anyone was already using an alternative. We understand your concerns and have shared them with our team, so we can continue looking into adjusting this in a future release.

    Feature Tabs

    Regarding our Pro feature tabs, I have shared this feedback with our team and I can see where you are coming from. Simplicity and functionality is important to us as well.

    We ensured that the core purpose/functionality of WP Mail SMTP can be achieved via the the first setting screen (or our Setup Wizard) and all basic troubleshooting tools (sending test emails, debugging email sending etc) are available in the free version. We will look into how we can make improvements with our current layout for future release.

    If you have anymore feedback that you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to let us know so that we can continue improving WP Mail SMTP.

    Thread Starter clip1492

    (@clip1492)

    Today I discovered that the unsolicited install of WPforms even bloated the WP database with 4 tables on my production site, which have not been removed after uninstalling WPforms:

    _wpforms_payment
    _wpforms_payment_meta
    _wpforms_tasks
    _wpforms_tasks_meta

    Maybe this is useful for other folks who had the same issue and like to have their database tidy. I hope this chapter ends here.

    • This reply was modified 1 month ago by clip1492.
    • This reply was modified 1 month ago by clip1492.
    • This reply was modified 1 month ago by clip1492.
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