WordPress Emailing?

Hello spark36,

My experience has been that WordPress sending emails directly tends to work ok for low volume. Delivery time can be long (deferred cron jobs waiting for site traffic) and overall deliverability to user inbox (rather than their spam folder) can be inconsistent under some mixtures of circumstances related to email volume, host parameters, sending speed, IP address being spam listed, etc.

We use SendGrid for all transactional emails on 100 plus sites and also for mass newletter emailing to 40k plus recipients. Transactional emails are received instantly (password rests, etc.) and we have very few reports of Newletter delivery hitting user spam folders.

Even though we run a dedicated server, before we began using SendGrid, we had many user reports of not receiving password reset emails, not receive newsletters, etc.

We no longer get such reports with SendGrid.

This article may be of use:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/why-you-should-never-use-wordpress-to-send-newsletter-emails/

Best of luck!

Hi @spark36,

I always install a SMTP plugin and configure it with the email I use for the site (usually a gmail or hotmail account). This works well, but if you would like to use a separate emailing service then you can look into configuring your site with SendGrid or similar services.

Thank you @soobahkdo for answering this question and helping again!

Thanks again @soobahkdo and @ibenic for the response.

I already use ActiveCampaign as my ESP for newsletter type emails. Do I need to get a separate service for transaction emails or could I use the same provider? How can I integrate Simple Giveaways with a transactional email provider, instead of using WordPress to send the Activation, winner, and non-winner emails?

I’ve setup a SendGrid account and connected it to WordPress using the WP Mail SMTP plugin. I tested sending an email using the test feature in the WP Mail SMTP plugin and it worked. However, when I signed up for a test Giveaway I created, the activation email wasn’t sent by SendGrid. It also arrived in my Junk folder. How can I connect the Simple Giveaways plugin to use my SendGrid account for transactional emails?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by spark36.

Hi @spark36, since the plugin is using the core wp_mail function to send emails, SendGrid should be able to send such emails.

In case you’re using premium integrations such as newsletter, check if you have the checked to disable the subscribed email (in case your newsletter has a welcome email).

@ibenic, you would expect the settings in the WP Mail SMTP plugin to override the default wp_mail function, so that it uses SendGrid? I’m not sure why it’s not working then. I’ll keep looking into it. Please let me know if you can point me to any resources for getting this to work with the giveaway plugin.

Thanks again.

@ibenic, nevermind. I checked my Sendgrid account activity and see that the activation email was in fact delivered by Sendgrid. So all good here. I still need to figure out why it was sent to junk though.