Custom SMTP vs Mail logging – WP Mail Catcher

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.

Logging your mail will stop you from ever losing your emails again! This fast, lightweight plugin (under 140kb in size!) is also useful for debugging or backing up your messages. Just install and activate then all of your contact form emails will be logged and saved to your DB with no additional configuration required. View and manage all your form submissions through the default WordPress interface. An email failed to send? With a single click you can resend the backed up email. Send emails out directly from the WordPress interface. Also includes support for attachments. Immediately find out if your contact form submission was successfully sent. Features Zero setup required – just install and away you go Minimalistic – no overbloated features you never use weighing your site down – under 140kb in size! Bulk export emails to CSV for easy inclusion into Excel or any other program Compose new emails with the WordPress controls you’re already familiar with Resend your emails in bulk Debugging – see exactly which file and code line was responsible for sending the email, along with any errors encountered Manage what user permissions can see the logs Routinely have your logs cleared out at a specified time – or keep them forever Need to be notified when there’s a problem sending your mail? We’ve got hooks that allow you to do just that Completely free Hooks and actions wp_mail_catcher_mail_success is triggered when a message is sent and logged successfully. It has a single argument that is an array containing the log id related to the id in the mail_catcher_logs MySQL table time relative, readable time to when the log was saved email_to the email address(es) that the message was sent to subject the subject line of the message message the contents of the message status an integer depicting if the message was sent successfully or not (1 = sent successfully. 0 = sending failed) error the error that occurred – if any backtrace_segment a json_encoded object that shows which file and line the mail was initially triggered from attachments a list of any attachments that were sent along with the email additional_headers a list of any headers that were sent attachment_file_paths a list of the location of any attachments that were sent timestamp a unix timestamp of when the email was sent is_html a boolean, that will be true if the message is a html email and false if not email_from the from value of the email wp_mail_catcher_mail_failed is triggered when a message failed to send and logged successfully. It has a single argument that is an array containing the log (same as the arguments for wp_mail_catcher_mail_success) wp_mail_catcher_deletion_intervals is a filter that should return an array where each key is an amount of time in seconds, and the value is the label. Used to determine when a message has expired and should be deleted wp_mail_catcher_before_success_log_save is a filter that is called just before a successful log is saved. It has a single argument that is the transformed log that will be saved – use this to alter the log before it’s saved. Returning false will stop the log from being saved. Also note that this is fired even when an email has errored, because all logs are initially saved as “successful” before being possibly updated with an error (if applicable). This is because of the way the wp_mail and wp_mail_failed are implemented in WordPress. time a unix timestamp of when the email was sent email_to the email address(es) that the message was sent to subject the subject line of the message message the contents of the message backtrace_segment an array that shows which file and line the mail was initially triggered from wp_mail_catcher_before_error_log_save time a unix timestamp of when the email was sent email_to the email address(es) that the message was sent to subject the subject line of the message message the contents of the message backtrace_segment an array that shows which file and line the mail was initially triggered from error the error that occurred