Cherkasov SMTP Mailer vs WP Mail SMTP by WPForms – SMTP for Reliable

The default wp_mail() function in WordPress can often be unreliable. Many hosting providers limit or poorly configure email sending, which leads to important notifications (like registrations, password resets, or WooCommerce orders) ending up in spam or not being delivered at all. Cherkasov SMTP Mailer solves this problem by re-routing all your site’s outgoing emails through a professional SMTP server (such as Gmail, SendGrid, or any other mail service). This significantly increases the reliability and deliverability of your emails. The plugin features a modern, intuitive interface, an advanced email log, and the ability to receive instant notifications about sending statuses in your Telegram. Features Reliable Delivery: Send emails through any SMTP server to avoid spam filters. Easy Configuration: Quick presets for popular services (Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid) and flexible options for any other SMTP provider. Email Log: Keeps a detailed log of all sent emails. View content, status, headers, and error messages. Log Management: Search for emails, resend failed messages (one by one or all at once), and delete entries. Telegram Notifications: Get instant messages in Telegram about successfully sent or failed emails. Testing Tool: A built-in feature to send a test email to verify your settings and see a detailed debug log. Security: Passwords and tokens are not displayed in the form after being saved and are transmitted securely. Modern UI: A clean, responsive, and user-friendly interface built with modern web technologies. Retention Policies: Configure automatic deletion of old log entries to keep your database clean. Configuration After activating the plugin, go to Settings > Cherkasov SMTP Mailer. 1. Main SMTP Settings Mailer: SMTP: Choose this option to send emails via an external server. Default WP Mailer: Use your host’s standard mail function (not recommended). Providers: You can select a popular provider (Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid) to auto-fill the host and port fields. SMTP Host, Port, and Encryption: Enter the details provided by your email service provider. Authentication: In most cases, this toggle should be enabled. SMTP Credentials: Enter the username (usually your email address) and password for your email account. For Gmail/Google: If you have two-factor authentication enabled, you must create an “App Password” in your Google account’s security settings and use it here. Save Changes. 2. Sender Details From Name: The name recipients will see. From Email: The address emails will be sent from. Force Sender: If enabled, all emails from your site (even from other plugins) will be sent using the specified From Name and From Email. 3. Telegram Notifications Click the “Telegram Notifications” button. Enable the “Enable Telegram Notifications” option. Bot Token: Create a new bot by talking to @BotFather on Telegram. It will provide you with a unique token. Paste it here. Chat ID: Talk to the @userinfobot and click “Start.” It will send you your unique ID. Paste it here. Choose which events you want to be notified about (failed and/or successful sends). Save the settings and click “Send Test” to verify. Third-Party Services This plugin uses the Telegram API to send notifications about the status of sent emails. This functionality is optional and only activated if you enable it in the settings and provide your own Telegram Bot Token and Chat ID. Service: Telegram Bot API Data Sent: When enabled, the plugin sends the recipient’s email address, email subject, your site’s URL, and the sending status (success or failure) to the Telegram API to be delivered to your specified chat. Terms of Service: https://telegram.org/tos Privacy Policy: https://telegram.org/privacy

WordPress Mail SMTP Plugin Is your WordPress site not sending emails? You’re not alone. 4+ million websites use WP Mail SMTP to send emails reliably. Our goal is to make email deliverability easy so that your emails reach the inbox. WP Mail SMTP fixes your email deliverability issues by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider when sending emails. Best of all, our easy-to-use Setup Wizard and detailed documentation guide you through the process. WP Mail SMTP is free and has everything you need to reliably send your WordPress emails! WP Mail SMTP Pro adds even more powerful features like email logging, advanced email reporting and stats, backup connections, email alerts, smart conditional routing, and much more. What is SMTP? SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an industry-standard for sending emails. Proper SMTP configuration helps increase email deliverability by adding authentication to the emails sent from your site. Popular email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Office 365, and Zoho are in a constant battle with email spammers, so they check whether emails are originating from a genuine sender. If the proper authentication isn’t there, emails either go in the SPAM folder or, worse, disappear. This is a problem for a lot of WordPress sites. By default, WordPress uses the PHP mail function to send emails generated by WordPress or any contact form plugin like WPForms. But most WordPress hosting companies don’t have their servers properly configured for sending PHP emails. This is why WordPress emails aren’t delivered. How does WP Mail SMTP work? WP Mail SMTP plugin easily resolves email delivery problems by changing the way your WordPress site sends email. We reconfigure the wp_mail() function to use proper SMTP host credentials or an SMTP mail provider. With our built-in SMTP mail provider integrations (recommended), emails are sent using the provider’s direct API. This works even if your web host is blocking SMTP ports. This helps you fix common WordPress not sending email issues. WP Mail SMTP plugin includes many different SMTP mailers: SendLayer (Recommended) SMTP.com (Recommended) Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) (Recommended) Gmail SMTP (Gmail, Google Workspace, G Suite) Elastic Email Mailgun Mailjet MailerSend Mandrill Postmark Resend SendGrid SMTP2GO SparkPost Microsoft One-Click Setup (Outlook.com and Office 365) [Pro] Amazon SES [Pro] Zoho Mail [Pro] Other SMTP For most options, you can specify the “from name” and “email address” for outgoing emails too. If you don’t know which mailer to choose, see our Complete Guide to WP Mail SMTP Mailers. SendLayer SendLayer is our recommended transactional email service. Its affordable pricing and super fast setup make it a great choice for sending emails from WordPress. It also has open and click tracking and email logs. SendLayer is reliable, fast, and easy to set up. You can send hundreds of emails for free when you sign up for a trial. Read our SendLayer documentation for more details. SMTP.COM SMTP.com is a recommended transactional email service. With over 22 years of email delivery expertise, SMTP.com has a reputation as a reliable sender. You can start sending emails in minutes and benefit from 50,000 free emails in your first 30 days. Read our SMTP.com documentation for more details. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Brevo is a recommended transactional email service. It serves 80,000+ companies worldwide. Brevo is reliable, fast, and gives you 300 free emails per day. Read our Brevo documentation for more details. WP Mail SMTP PRO WP Mail SMTP Pro is a separate paid plugin. Everything in this section is only available in Pro and isn’t part of this free plugin. In addition to native Microsoft, Amazon SES, and Zoho Mail integrations, Pro includes: Click here to purchase WP Mail SMTP Pro now! Email Log (Pro) Email logging is a powerful feature that keeps a record of all sent emails in WordPress. Email logging helps you to archive, audit, resend, or test email delivery and formatting. Our WordPress email logs also include: Email Log Details Our email logs provide a complete history of all emails sent from WordPress. View the subject, sender, recipients, content, headers, open and click rates, delivery status, source plugin, and more! Resend Emails Resend emails individually or in bulk, whether they failed or were delivered successfully. You can also forward important emails to an alternative email address. And many more Email Log Features Store all email attachments, export email logs, print emails, see delivery status, and more. Email Reports (Pro) Review weekly sent and failed emails in a dashboard chart. Email reports make it easy to track deliverability and engagement. Open rates and click-through rates are grouped by subject line, making it easy to see the performance of your campaigns or notifications. Weekly Email Summary Get statistics about WordPress emails, including how many emails are being sent and which ones are being opened and clicked. The Summary also shows you deliverability statistics without the need to log in to WordPress to check them. Track Email Opens and Clicks View open and click stats for WordPress emails, grouped by subject line in your Email Report. Email Alerts (Pro) If your emails stop sending, get notified instantly via Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, SMS/ Twilio, webhooks, or email (via secure API). In combination with our email logging and resending features, Email Alerts help make sure important emails don’t go missing. Backup Connection (Pro) Configure an extra connection that kicks in if your primary connection fails. WP Mail SMTP automatically detects connection issues and automatically switches to the backup mailer. It will also automatically retry emails that failed. Smart Conditional Routing (Pro) Create criteria to send different types of emails using different mailers. Filter by the contents of the email Subject or Message, From or To addresses, the plugin that generated the email, and more. This allows you to mix transactional and marketing providers to improve deliverability. Rate Limiting (Pro) Control the number of emails your WordPress site sends in a specific amount of time so you stay within your SMTP provider’s rate limits. WP Mail SMTP allows you to specify the maximum number of emails that will be sent every minute, hour, day, week, or month and automatically queues emails to stay within those limits. Optimized Email Sending (Pro) Are emails slowing down your site? Let WP Mail SMTP queue your emails for better performance. With optimized sending, emails are queued in the background and sent when your server has sufficient resources, avoiding bottlenecks that can slow down your site. Manage WordPress Emails and Notifications (Pro) Control the default notifications WordPress sends. Use a simple switch to disable specific types of notifications if you don’t want to receive them. WordPress Multisite (Pro) WordPress Multisite Network Settings For users running a multisite network, save time with a centralized location to easily configure your SMTP settings for all sites. Manage Multisite Email Logs Easily Network Admins can view and manage email logs for subsites with easy switching and dashboard views. Expert Support We provide limited support on the WordPress.org forums. One-on-one email support is available to WP Mail SMTP Pro users. White Glove Setup (paid service) If you’re not sure how to fix your emails, sit back and relax. We’ll set up WP Mail SMTP for you! White Glove Setup includes installation, configuration in WordPress, DNS configuration, full mailer setup, and testing. White Glove Setup is available for our recommended mailers: SendLayer, Brevo, and SMTP.com. Credits WP Mail SMTP plugin was originally created by Callum Macdonald. It is now owned and maintained by the team behind WPForms – a drag & drop form builder for WordPress. You can try the free version of WPForms plugin to give your visitors an easy way to contact you. External services WP Mail SMTP connects to the external services listed below. Each entry explains what is sent and when. Unless an entry says otherwise, requests to WP Mail SMTP services identify only the plugin version (for example WPMailSMTP/4.10.0). If you turn on usage tracking, they also include your WordPress version, site URL and license type. Email sending providers Your emails are sent through the mailer you choose in WP Mail SMTP > Settings. When WordPress sends an email, the message (recipients, subject, content, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider. Connecting an account (for example SendLayer Quick Connect or signing in with Google) and checking your mailer settings in the Setup Wizard also contact the provider you selected. No provider is contacted until you select and configure it. Depending on the email provider you connect, the email data is sent using their SMTP servers subject to their respective Terms of Service and Privacy Policy which you can review individually by looking at respective integration provider you choose to connect with. WP Mail SMTP API (wpmailsmtpapi.com) Error documentation: when an email fails to send, and you open a WP Mail SMTP admin page, a public list of help articles for known sending errors is downloaded, so the error notice can link to the right article. The request doesn’t include your mailer, site URL or any other details about your site. Results are cached for one week. Announcements Feed: plugin release announcements are downloaded via our announcement feed. This request doesn’t include your site URL or any other details about your site. You can also turn it off with “Hide Announcements” in WP Mail SMTP > Settings > Misc. Hosted Setup Wizard: when you click “Let’s Get Started” in the Setup Wizard, your site URL details are sent, so the wizard can recommend WP Mail SMTP settings for your site. Terms: https://wpmailsmtp.com/terms/ Privacy policy: https://wpmailsmtp.com/privacy-policy/ WP Mail SMTP Connect (connect.wpmailsmtp.com) Domain check: your From email address, mailer and sending domain are sent to check your domain’s DNS records. This runs when you send a test email and at the end of the Setup Wizard. Tools > Site Health shows the result of your last check. Google sign-in: when you connect a Gmail account, Google’s authorization response passes through this service on its way back to your site. Terms: https://wpmailsmtp.com/terms/ Privacy policy: https://wpmailsmtp.com/privacy-policy/ WP Mail SMTP usage tracking (wpmailsmtpusage.com) Only when you turn on “Allow Usage Tracking” in WP Mail SMTP > Settings > Misc, which is off by default. If enabled, the plugin sends us relevant product usage diagnostics to help us improve the plugin and our service. Terms: https://wpmailsmtp.com/terms/ Privacy policy: https://wpmailsmtp.com/privacy-policy/ Email Detective by SendLayer (detective.sendlayer.com) When you run a deliverability test on the Email Detective page, your site sends a test email through your mailer to an address the service provides, and the result of that send (success, or the error message) is reported back. To perform this test, your site URL, mailer, plugin version and license type are sent to this service. If you ask for the report by email, the email address you enter is sent too. Terms: https://sendlayer.com/terms-of-service/ Privacy policy: https://sendlayer.com/privacy-policy/ WPCode snippet library (library.wpcode.com) When you open the Code Snippets page and the WPCode plugin isn’t active, a list of email-related code snippets is downloaded. The request identifies only the plugin version, unless usage tracking is on. Results are cached for one day. Terms: https://wpcode.com/terms-of-service/ Privacy policy: https://wpcode.com/privacy-policy/