KeepInMind Dashboard Notes vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

KeepInMind Dashboard Notes turns your WordPress dashboard into a collaborative workspace. Place notes directly on any admin page – anchored to the exact element you’re talking about. No more Slack messages, emails, or random chats saying “that field on the product edit page” – just click, write your note, and your team sees it right where it matters. Why KeepInMind Dashboard Notes? Whether you’re working in a team or managing a site on your own, the same problem keeps coming up: how to keep track of decisions in the dashboard. Which settings need to change? What does this custom field do? Why is this item configured this way? KeepInMind Dashboard Notes solves this by letting you pin notes directly to dashboard elements – for your team, or for your future self. Here are just a few real-world scenarios where it shines: You temporarily disable a plugin to test whether it’s causing a conflict. Drop a Warning note on the Plugins page so everyone knows it was turned off on purpose – and so you remember to check back in three weeks. You installed a plugin for one very specific reason that isn’t obvious. Pin a note to it explaining why it’s there, so another admin – or future you – doesn’t delete it thinking it’s unused. A client keeps changing a setting that breaks their site. Attach an always-visible Alert banner right next to that toggle: “Do not change – this controls the checkout redirect.” Your developer configured a custom field with a non-obvious format. Leave a note on the field itself explaining what values are expected, so the content team doesn’t have to guess. You’re onboarding a new team member. Instead of writing a separate training doc, scatter helpful Attention banners across the pages they’ll use most – guidance that shows up exactly where they need it. You’re running a staging review before launch. Pin notes to every area that needs a final check, and let your team reply with updates as they work through the list. Key Features Pin Notes Anywhere Click any element on any admin page to leave a note. Your note stays anchored to that exact element – a form field, a menu item, a settings toggle, a table row. When your teammate visits the page, they see the note marker right where it belongs. Rich Text Editing Format your notes with bold text, links, and text colors. The floating toolbar appears on text selection. Three Note Types: Pinned Note – Appears as a marker on the page. Click to open and manage a threaded discussion. Open Note – Always visible inline. Choose a color to highlight the note based on its importance. Sticky Note – Bold square note that sticks in place for highly visible reminders and warnings. @Mention Teammates Type @ to mention any allowed user. They’ll receive an email notification with your note. Autocomplete helps you find the right person fast – just keep typing to filter. Private notes Mark any note as private so only you can see it. Perfect for personal reminders and work-in-progress notes. Threaded Replies Pinned notes support full threaded replies. Keep conversations organized and contextual without cluttering the page. Drag & Relocate Notes can be dragged to a new element if the page layout changes. Grab the drag grip and drop it on the right spot – all replies move with it. Note Scoping On entity pages (posts, terms, users), choose whether your note applies to this specific item or all items of this type. For example, a note on the “Blue T-Shirt” edit page can be scoped just to that product – or to the edit page of all products. Configurable Permissions Control exactly who can add notes and who can edit or delete: Role-based access – Choose which roles can use the plugin (Administrator is always included). User-level access – Whitelist specific users regardless of role. Edit/Delete/Relocate policies – Author only, role hierarchy (strict or relaxed), or everybody.

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.