Casa Mail vs Custom SMTP

Casa Mail is an end-to-end email platform for WordPress sites. It intercepts every wp_mail() call and delivers it through the Casa Mail gateway operated by CodeCasa Studios on the OnlineStoreNotifications infrastructure (api.onlinestorenotifications.com). On top of reliable transactional delivery it adds a full marketing platform, branded webmail mailboxes, and one-click sender-domain authentication, all driven from the WordPress admin. If your site doesn’t send mail reliably today, Casa Mail is the simplest way to start. If you’re already paying for an SMTP plugin plus a separate marketing tool plus a separate webmail provider, Casa Mail consolidates the three so you can run customer email, broadcasts, and inbox replies from one place. What you get Transactional email (every plan, including Free) Every wp_mail() is routed through the Casa Mail gateway with DKIM, SPF, and aligned Return-Path on onlinestorenotifications.com (or your own domain after one-click authentication). Durable retry outbox: if the gateway is briefly unreachable, the payload is persisted and retried automatically with 30s, 2m, 10m backoff. wp_mail() never blocks, never loses a message, never returns false to the caller. Per-tenant inbox at @onlinestorenotifications.com. Replies to your customer emails come back to that inbox; on the Free tier they auto-forward to your contact address. On webmail-enabled plans you can also receive replies on your own domain (e.g. @yourdomain.com). Paginated send log on the Logs page with up to 30 days of history retained (hard-capped at 2,000 rows per WordPress install). The Dashboard surfaces the most recent activity at a glance. Optional default-From override so every site email uses one consistent sender. Sender domain authentication (every plan) Add your own domain in the admin and the plugin prints three DNS records (DKIM, SPF, Return-Path). One-click “Check my domain” verifier. Once verified, customer emails go from @yourdomain.com so Gmail and Outlook show your brand in the From, not “via onlinestorenotifications.com”. Inline plain-English helpers for Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Google Domains. Cloudflare grey-cloud guidance for replies is built in. Free plan can opt out of domain authentication entirely and send from the shared @onlinestorenotifications.com address with DKIM/SPF/Return-Path already configured on the gateway. Marketing Studio (Growth and higher) Contacts: add manually, import from CSV, or one-click sync your WooCommerce customer base. Segments: saved queries (all contacts, contacts with a specific tag) with a sample-preview before you send. Campaigns: schedule a broadcast to a segment, watch send progress on a per-campaign report (sent, opens, unique-by-contact open + click rate). Composer: full block-based visual editor with heading / paragraph / image / button / divider / spacer / two-columns / raw-HTML blocks, per-block and global style settings, Visual / Source HTML / Wrapper / Preview tabs, desktop + mobile preview, 50-step undo/redo, emoji picker, drag-and-drop images into the WordPress media library, per-tenant saved templates. Personalization tokens: [FIRST_NAME], [LAST_NAME], [FULL_NAME], [EMAIL], [UNSUBSCRIBE_URL]. Suppressions: paginated list with bounce / complaint / unsubscribe filters, manual add, CSV export. Bounces and FBL complaints are fanned out from the gateway automatically so you never have to clean a list by hand. Casa Webmail mailboxes (Growth and higher) Self-hosted branded webmail at webmail.onlinestorenotifications.com. Sign in with @onlinestorenotifications.com from any browser and read and reply to customer replies from a clean inbox. Use your own domain too: point your domain’s MX records at mx.sendemailtoday.io and replies to @yourdomain.com land in the same webmail UI, signed by the platform DKIM. Real Maildir storage on the Casa Mail backbone. No third-party Gmail forwarding. Billing and plan management One-click upgrade from Free to Starter, Growth, Business, or Agency. Stripe Checkout opens in a new tab; the plugin never sees your card details. Paid plans are also available straight from the onboarding wizard, so you can start on the right tier from day one. In-WordPress quota-usage display with an “approaching cap” banner so a busy month doesn’t surprise you mid-send. Stripe-hosted billing portal for change-card, change-plan, view-invoices, cancel. Built-in trust and safety Sender-domain enforcement so a misconfigured WordPress install can never send under someone else’s domain by accident. Gateway-side content review on marketing broadcasts: a separate moderation layer scans campaigns and pauses anything that looks like phishing, brand impersonation, or credential harvesting before it reaches your recipients. The gateway operator reviews flagged content and contacts you with the reason. This protects your sender reputation. Pricing Free: 10,000 transactional emails per month, full quota from day one (no daily ramp), 500/day soft cap. Custom-domain authentication included. No credit card required. Starter (GBP 9/month): 25,000 emails per month, 2,500/day cap. Custom-domain authentication. Growth (GBP 29/month): 100,000 emails per month, Marketing Studio (contacts, segments, campaigns, visual editor, suppressions), 1 branded Casa Webmail mailbox. Business (GBP 79/month): 500,000 emails per month, Marketing Studio, 5 mailboxes. Agency (GBP 199/month): 2,000,000 emails per month, Marketing Studio, 25 mailboxes. Upgrades and downgrades are entirely self-serve from Settings -> Casa Mail -> Billing. Cancellation is one click from the Stripe-hosted portal; you keep service through the end of your billing cycle. How it works (transactional path) pre_wp_mail is hooked at priority 1. Each call is converted to a JSON payload and POSTed to the gateway. If the gateway accepts on the first POST, wp_mail() returns true and the message is durably enqueued upstream. If the gateway is unreachable on the first POST, the payload is written to a durable outbox table ( casamail_outbox) and a cron tick retries with 30s, 2m, 10m backoff. A separate transmit log table ( casamail_sends) records every attempt for visibility on the plugin dashboard. Rows older than 30 days are pruned automatically. Onboarding After activation, an in-WordPress wizard collects: Site name, site URL, contact email address. A 6-digit code emailed by the gateway to confirm the address. The handle to use for your inbox (defaults to a friendly version of your site URL, e.g. acmestore). Plan selection. Five tiers shown side-by-side (Free, Starter, Growth, Business, Agency); pick Free to get started immediately, or pick a paid tier to launch Stripe Checkout in a new tab. Either way your tenant is already provisioned so you can keep onboarding while you complete payment. Where customer emails should come from: the shared Casa Mail address, or your own authenticated domain (with one-click DNS verification). The whole onboarding is one screen with five short steps. No SMTP keys to copy, no DNS console to leave WordPress for. Trademark note This plugin is not affiliated with or endorsed by WooCommerce, Automattic, or any third party. The WooCommerce name appears only as a compatibility note (when WooCommerce is detected, the plugin’s admin menu attaches under it for convenience; otherwise it lands under Settings). External services This plugin transmits data to a third-party SMTP gateway. WordPress.org policy requires this be disclosed. Endpoints contacted The plugin makes HTTPS requests to: https://api.onlinestorenotifications.com/v1/onboard/request – during onboarding, to send your verification email. https://api.onlinestorenotifications.com/v1/onboard/verify – during onboarding, to confirm the code and provision an account. https://api.onlinestorenotifications.com/v1/send – for every wp_mail() call once the plugin is onboarded. https://api.onlinestorenotifications.com/v1/email/domain (GET / add / verify) – when the site administrator interacts with the Sender Domain page. https://api.onlinestorenotifications.com/v1/billing/* – checkout, billing portal, plan status. Only invoked when the site administrator interacts with the Billing page or picks a paid tier during onboarding. The gateway is operated by CodeCasa Studios under the Casa Mail brand and runs on the OnlineStoreNotifications infrastructure. Casa Mail and OnlineStoreNotifications are sister brands of the same company; the API hostname reflects the shared backbone rather than a third-party dependency. Data sent During onboarding (one-time, before any send): site administrator email address, site name, site URL. For each wp_mail() call once onboarded: sender email address, sender name, recipient email address(es), subject, message body, message headers (after stripping From/To/Subject/Date/Message-ID/MIME-Version/Content-Type/Content-Transfer-Encoding). Terms and privacy Terms of service: https://sendemailtoday.io/terms.html Privacy policy: https://sendemailtoday.io/privacy.html Privacy When activated, this plugin transmits email content (recipient, sender, subject, body, headers) to a third-party SMTP gateway for delivery. This is the plugin’s only purpose. The data lifecycle is described above under “External services” and on the linked privacy policy. The plugin also writes a wp_add_privacy_policy_content() block describing what is transmitted; this lets site administrators include the disclosure in the WordPress-managed privacy policy page (Settings -> Privacy). Account deletion: a “Request account deletion” button on the plugin’s Settings page emails the gateway operator. Upon confirmation, the tenant record, API key(s), domain-authentication records, and recent sending history are removed from the gateway side. The plugin uninstall additionally removes the plugin’s WordPress-side options + tables.

Make your WordPress email arrive WordPress still hands your email to the PHP mail() function. Most hosts have switched it off or throttled it because spammers loved it, and where it still runs, unauthenticated mail lands in spam. If your contact form says thank you and nothing ever arrives, this is why. Custom SMTP sends your email through the provider you already use instead: your host’s SMTP server, Gmail, Outlook, Brevo, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark or the Amazon SES API. It logs every message with its outcome, lets you preview and resend failures, and alerts you when sending spikes or starts failing. Everything is in the free plugin: no account to create, no third-party relay, no pro version. Built for modern WordPress: WordPress 7.0 ready, PHPMailer 7.0.2 compatible, stateless / cloud-ready (Docker, Kubernetes), and fully translated in English and French. Documentation lives at customsmtp.com/docs/, with step-by-step guides for twelve providers and a developer guide covering constants, environment variables and the Amazon SES API. Send through your own SMTP provider Point the plugin at the server you already pay for or the free tier you already use, with a preset that fills the technical values for you: Presets for twelve providers: Gmail, Outlook, Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Brevo, Postmark, Mailjet, Zoho, Yahoo, iCloud and Scaleway, plus “Other / Custom” for any SMTP server. From Name and From Email applied to every outgoing email, with optional Reply-To, CC and BCC. SSL/TLS encryption, and optional authentication for relay servers that need none. Password encrypted at rest (AES-256-CBC with your WordPress salts), never displayed back in the form. Test without guessing: test the SMTP connection without sending anything, or send yourself a real test email. A log of every email, with preview and resend Never wonder if your emails were sent again. Logging works out of the box and captures every message going through wp_mail(): WooCommerce order notifications, contact form submissions, password resets, all of it. Delivery status (sent or failed) with the exact SMTP error when a message fails, and the stored headers for advanced troubleshooting. Preview the email body in wp-admin, in an Outlook-style sidebar, without sending anything again; view the HTML source, or download any email as an HTML file for archiving. Resend a failed email straight from the logs once your configuration is fixed. Search by recipient, subject or status; filter by date range; export to CSV for reporting and compliance. Configurable retention with automatic purge (30 days by default), and content storage you can switch off in one click. Unusual Usage Alerts A compromised contact form or a runaway plugin can turn your site into a spam relay, and a revoked password or an exhausted provider quota can stop your emails silently. Custom SMTP watches for both and warns you. Sending spikes — get an email when more messages than expected go out within an hour or a day. Thresholds are absolute, never relative, so a quiet site that sends a handful of emails a week is never woken up by statistical noise. Delivery failures — get warned as soon as several emails fail in a row, or when too many of the last messages sent failed. Counted over the last emails sent rather than over a period of time, so it works just as well on a site that sends twice a week as on a busy store. A channel that survives the outage — alerts go out by email, to an optional HTTPS webhook (Slack, Teams, any JSON endpoint), and to a persistent notice in wp-admin, because the one moment you need the alert is the moment email itself is broken. No noise — a configurable cooldown keeps an ongoing incident from filling your inbox, and the alert email is never logged nor counted against your own thresholds. Off by default — turn it on in Settings and set the thresholds that match your site. Manage WordPress Notifications WordPress sends a handful of emails on its own, and some of them get old fast: a notice to the administrator every single time a user resets their password, a report after every automatic plugin update, a message for every comment awaiting moderation. Switch off the ones you do not want, one checkbox each, no code. Password reset and new user notices to the administrator — the user still gets their reset link and their welcome email, only the copy to the admin stops. Automatic update reports — core, plugins and themes, separately. Comment notifications — awaiting moderation, and new comment to the post author. Nothing is hidden from you — a notification you switch off is never created, so it will not appear in the Email Logs either, and the screen tells you that. Account recovery is never at risk — the emails users need to regain access to their account are deliberately out of reach of this screen. Off means off, on stays on — installing or updating the plugin never silences an email your site was already sending. Deliverability, privacy, security Cooperates with the automatic Envelope-From / Return-Path behavior introduced in WordPress 6.9, which improves SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment on strict hosts (Amazon SES, Postmark, etc.). UTF-8 and emoji handled end-to-end in subjects, bodies and headers. All data stays in your WordPress database: no third-party calls, no telemetry, and no external processor to declare in your GDPR records. Email preview rendered in a sandboxed iframe, so no JavaScript from a logged email ever runs in wp-admin. All admin actions protected with nonces and capability checks; the SMTP password is encrypted at rest. For developers: containers, config-as-code, Amazon SES API The developer guide covers this surface in depth; the short version: Stateless and cloud-ready: no filesystem writes, no shared storage, safe on read-only filesystems. Works on Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS/Fargate, Google Cloud Run, and with Bedrock or Trellis stacks. Every setting from a constant or environment variable: define CUSTOM_SMTP_ and it overrides the saved value everywhere, with the field shown read-only in wp-admin and a badge naming the variable. On Multisite, a network-wide option can configure every site at once. Amazon SES API with IAM roles: send through the SESv2 API authenticated by your ECS task role or EC2 instance role, with no access keys and no stored credentials. Raw MIME preserves HTML, attachments, CC/BCC, Reply-To and custom headers, and it works with or without the AWS SDK for PHP. Details in the FAQ below. Abilities API (WordPress 6.9+): custom-smtp/connection-health and custom-smtp/send-test-email are exposed to MCP-enabled AI assistants and automation tools (n8n, Make), behind the same manage_options capability check as wp-admin.