Casa Mail vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

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.

For years, almost every WordPress site I ran ended up with a different plugin just to send email. I never really chose them. I installed whatever looked fine at the time, because honestly there is no clear winner. Most of them advertise features I don’t need, or hide the basics behind a paywall. At one point I simply wanted to see the emails my site had sent, or failed to send, and even that asked me to upgrade. That felt wrong. So I decided to build the simplest and most honest email plugin I could for WordPress. You pick one provider, set it up once, and every email your site sends goes through it. Everything is logged, so you always know what happened. No upsell maze, no ads, nothing basic locked away. That is Meow Mailer, and all of this is free: One provider, set up once. Pick the one you use and forget about it. No confusing multi provider routing. Import from your current SMTP plugin. Already set up with WP Mail SMTP or Easy WP SMTP? Meow Mailer notices and copies the provider, credentials and sender over in one click, so switching never means digging out your API keys again. A fallback for when it breaks, free. Name a second provider (or plain WordPress, which needs no setup) and it steps in only when the first one refuses an email. Your mail still goes out, the log tells you exactly who failed and why, and an alert lets you know your main provider needs a look. A real email log, free. Every email in a clean table with recipient, subject, provider and status (sent, failed, offline, pending). Click any row to read the full message, see the error, and resend it. Many plugins charge for this. Here it is free. Stays out of the way. Until you pick a provider, Meow Mailer doesn’t change how your email is sent, so activating it never breaks what already works. It still logs everything WordPress sends on its own, so you get the log from the moment you activate it. Never miss a failure. A dashboard warning appears when emails fail, so silent problems don’t go unnoticed. Dismiss it once you have had a look and it stays away until a new email fails. Failure alerts by email, free. Get told when your site stops being able to send, instead of finding out from a customer. The alert is sent by WordPress itself rather than your provider, so it still reaches you when the provider is the thing that broke. One alert per hour at most, however many emails fail. Alerts on Slack, Discord or Teams, free. Paste a webhook URL and the alerts and the weekly summary are posted to your chat as well, so finding out that email is broken never depends on email. Handy when you look after a lot of sites. Individual emails are never posted anywhere: this tells you about your site, not about the people it writes to. Weekly summary, free. A short email with what was sent, what failed, and the most common errors. Nothing is sent on a quiet week. Control WordPress’s own emails. Switch off the notifications WordPress sends by itself: new user registrations, password and email change confirmations, comment moderation, automatic update reports. Password resets are never affected, so nobody gets locked out. Background sending. Email goes out after the page has loaded, so your visitors never wait on the mail server. Offline mode. Capture every email in the log without sending. Perfect for staging and development. Filters and export. Filter by status and provider, search by subject or recipient, and export to CSV. Test and resend. Check your setup with an HTML or plain text test, and resend any logged message in one click. Auto prune. Keep logs forever, or delete anything older than 7, 30 or 90 days. Multisite ready. Set your provider up once on the main site and let every site of the network use it, or leave each site to configure its own. Email logs always stay per site. Light and private. No bloat, no tracking. Your credentials can live in wp-config.php instead of the database. What Meow Mailer will never do No open or click tracking. Other email plugins advertise it as a premium feature. It works by putting an invisible pixel in every message and rewriting every link to pass through a redirect, which means logging when your recipients read their mail and what they clicked. That is surveillance of the people your site writes to, it is personal data you then have to account for under the GDPR, and rewritten links make your email look more like spam, not less. Meow Mailer does not do it, and that is not a gap waiting to be filled in a Pro version. There is no Pro version. Supported providers Generic SMTP, Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO, Mailjet, Resend, MailerSend, Maileroo, Gmail / Google Workspace (OAuth 2.0), Microsoft 365 / Outlook (OAuth 2.0), and Zoho Mail (OAuth 2.0). About Meow Apps Meow Mailer is part of the Meow Apps family of plugins, focused on doing one thing well with a clean, modern interface. External services Meow Mailer contacts an external service only after you choose and configure an email provider. Until then (the default “None”) and in “Offline” mode, it sends nothing anywhere. When you pick a provider, your outgoing email (recipients, subject, body, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider so it can be delivered, and only when your site actually sends an email. For Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail, Meow Mailer also contacts their OAuth servers when you connect and refresh your account. Nothing else is ever sent. You choose a single provider. Generic SMTP talks only to the server you configure. For the others, please review their terms and privacy policy: Mailgun (terms, privacy), Brevo (terms, privacy), SendGrid (terms, privacy), Amazon SES (terms, privacy), Postmark (terms, privacy), SMTP2GO (terms, privacy), Mailjet (terms, privacy), Resend (terms, privacy), MailerSend (terms and privacy), Maileroo (terms, privacy), Gmail (terms, privacy), Microsoft 365 (terms, privacy), and Zoho Mail (terms, privacy). Development Meow Mailer is open source. The full source, including the React code used to build the admin interface, lives on GitHub.