Email Essentials vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

Email Essentials vastly reduces the chances of your emails being marked as spam or being rejected. Originally a debugging tool, it has grown into a full-fledged email enhancement plugin. Please note that this plugin is not a “we support any type of transport” Email plugin. For other protocols than SMTP, but rather to enhance the email sending capabilities of WordPress. If you need to send emails with other protocols than SMTP, this plugin is not for you. You might want to look at plugins like Post SMTP (not affiliated). And since version 6.0.0, after more than 10 years of development and internal use, this plugin is now a FOSS plugin, meaning it is free to use, modify and distribute under the GPLv2 license. In return, we ask you to support the development of this plugin by contributing to the codebase, reporting bugs, and helping others in the community. Responsible disclosure: If you find a vulnerability, please email us at [email protected]. Features Set a good From name and email address, automatically correcting it if needed. For example, a contact form is sent from the visitors email address, resulting in an invalid Sender address. This plugin will correct it to a valid email address. This plugin automatically corrects it. Correct envelope-from address; often forgotten, but important for deliverability. Reformat as HTML with plain text alternative; will detect the use of HTML ensures that emails are sent as HTML with a plain text alternative. Process shortcodes in your email content. UTF8 recoding, to ensure that special characters are correctly encoded in the email. Email Essentials allows for adding CSS, header, footer, and body template using filters, see below. Convert CSS to inline styles for better support in email clients SMTP configuration Send emails to multiple addressees as separate emails S/MIME signing, using a supplied certificate, to ensure the authenticity of the email. DKIM signing, and providing all information needed to set up DKIM signing for your domain. Allow redirecting emails sent to the administrator to other email addresses based on the email subject. Allow redirecting emails sent to the moderators (e.g., for comments). Keep a history of outgoing emails (debugging, cleared on deactivation) Email receipt tracking (for investigative purposes only, see GDPR note) Re-send button for failed emails Allow sending emails delayed, to prevent sending too many emails at once. (Beta feature) Important Note This tool is for users who understand email delivery. If unsure, ask for help. Under GDPR, storing and tracking emails is prohibited. The history feature is for investigative purposes only! External services Email Essentials uses one external service by default, two if you create and define your own IP services. CloudFlare DNS over HTTPS (DoH). This is used to resolve domain names to IP addresses when (for example) checking SPF or DKIM records. In theory, it is possible to use PHPs own dns_get_record function, but in practice this often fails due to server DNS-resolve misconfiguration. Using CloudFlare’s DoH service ensures reliable DNS resolution. We only send the hostname (the domain part) to CloudFlare, no other data. Explicitly, we do NOT send any other information. The plugin can use an IP-address relay service to accurately determine the sender’s IP address. This is required to accurately check that the sender’s IP address is authorized to send email for the domain (SPF check). To use this, you will need to set up your own service, see documentation on filter acato_email_essentials_ip_services. Without this service, IP detection can be inaccurate because it will use the website itself as a relay. Use of a reverse proxy, load balancer etc. can lead to incorrect IP detection. WordPress Filters acato_email_essentials_settings — Filter plugin settings. acato_email_essentials_defaults — Filter default settings. acato_email_essentials_subject — Filter email subject. acato_email_essentials_body — Filter HTML body of the email. acato_email_essentials_head — Filter HEAD section of HTML email. acato_email_essentials_css — Filter CSS for the email. acato_email_essentials_minify_css — Filter CSS minification. acato_email_essentials_mail_is_throttled — Check if mail should be throttled. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_time_window — Set mail throttle time window. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_max_count_per_time_window — Set max emails per time window. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_batch_size — Set mail batch size. acato_email_essentials_ip_services — Define custom IP services for accurately determining the sender’s IP address. acato_email_essentials_ip_service — Filter individual IP service URLs. acato_email_essentials_website_root_path — Filter to supply the correct website root path in case of non-standard setups. acato_email_essentials_development_tlds — Filter development/local TLDs. WordPress Filters in detail Plugin Settings acato_email_essentials_settings Parameters: – (array) $settings The current settings of the plugin. Expected return: – (array) The new settings of the plugin. acato_email_essentials_defaults Parameters: – (array) $defaults The current default settings of the plugin. Expected return: – (array) The new default settings of the plugin. Email Content acato_email_essentials_subject Parameters: – (string) $the_subject Subject for the email. – (PHPMailer) $mailer The PHPMailer object (by reference). Expected return: – (string) The (altered) Subject. acato_email_essentials_body Parameters: – (string) $should_be_html A text that should be html, but might not yet be, your job to make a nice HTML body. – (PHPMailer) $mailer The PHPMailer object (by reference). Expected return: – (string) A text that should be html. acato_email_essentials_head Parameters: – (string) $the_head_section HTML that is the HEAD section of the HTML email. – (PHPMailer) $mailer The PHPMailer object (by reference). Expected return: – (string) The altered HEAD section of the HTML email. acato_email_essentials_css Parameters: – (string) $the_css CSS for the email (empty by default). – (PHPMailer) $mailer The PHPMailer object (by reference). Expected return: – (string) The (altered) CSS. acato_email_essentials_minify_css Parameters: – (string) $css CSS to be minified. Expected return: – (string) The minified CSS. Mail Throttling acato_email_essentials_mail_is_throttled Parameters: – (bool) $is_throttled Whether the mail is currently throttled. – (string) $ip The sender’s IP address. – (int) $mails_recently_sent Number of mails recently sent from this IP. Expected return: – (bool) Whether the mail should be throttled. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_time_window Parameters: – (int) $time_window Time window in seconds for counting sent emails. Expected return: – (int) The (altered) time window in seconds. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_max_count_per_time_window Parameters: – (int) $count Maximum number of emails allowed per time window. Expected return: – (int) The (altered) maximum count. acato_email_essentials_mail_throttle_batch_size Parameters: – (int) $size Number of emails to send in a single batch. Expected return: – (int) The (altered) batch size. IP Detection acato_email_essentials_ip_services Parameters: – (array) $services The current list of IP services used to determine the sender’s IP address. Expected return: – (array) The (altered) list of IP services. The services must be keyed with ipv4, ipv6 and dual-stack. The values must be URLs that return the IP address in plain text. The dual-stack service should return an IPv6 address if available, otherwise an IPv4 address, never both. You can set-up your own service like this; You will need a webserver that can run PHP, and you need a DNS service that allows you to manually add records. You will need three webspaces, for example; ipv4.myservice.com, ipv6.myservice.com and dual-stack.myservice.com. You could use the same webspace for all three, but you will still need three subdomains on the service. For the ipv4 subdomain, ONLY register an A record, pointing to the webserver’s IP address. For the ipv6 subdomain, ONLY register an AAAA record, pointing to the webserver’s IPv6 address. For the dual-stack subdomain, register both an A and an AAAA record, pointing to the webserver’s IP addresses. Create a file called index.php in each of the webspaces with the following content: php <?php header('Content-Type: text/plain'); print $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; That’s it. You can now use these services in the plugin settings like this; `php add_filter(‘acato_email_essentials_ip_services’, ‘my_custom_ip_services’); function my_custom_ip_services($services) { // Add your custom services here $services[‘ipv4’] = ‘https://ipv4.myservice.com’; $services[‘ipv6’] = ‘https://ipv6.myservice.com’; $services[‘dual-stack’] = ‘https://dual-stack.myservice.com’; return $services; } ` acato_email_essentials_ip_service Parameters: – (string) $service The URL of the IP service for the given type. – (string) $type The type of IP service (‘ipv4’, ‘ipv6’, or ‘dual-stack’). Expected return: – (string) The (altered) IP service URL. Filter to modify individual IP service URLs based on type. acato_email_essentials_website_root_path Parameters: – (string) $path The current website root path. Expected return: – (string) The (possibly altered) website root path. Filter to supply the correct website root path in case of non-standard setups. acato_email_essentials_development_tlds Parameters: – (array) $tlds Array of top-level domains considered as development environments. Expected return: – (array) The (altered) array of development TLDs. Filter to modify which TLDs are treated as development/local environments. Default values are ‘local’ and ‘test’. Scripts/styles In the public/scripts and public/styles folder you find the JS and CSS files used in the plugin admin area. These files are processed with Webpack, just so it works in all recent browsers. Script is nearly identical to the source. You can find the source files in the src/scripts and src/styles folders. If you feel the need to modify these files, you can change them there, and run npm install ; npm run build to create the production files. Translation files You can use npm run i18n to generate the POT file for translation, update the PO files in the languages folder, and compile to MO/php files. This is a one-task-does-all; run it, change the translations, run it again. Done. See package.json for more details or individual commands. Tools In the tools folder you will find a script to generate DKIM keys, should you want to use DKIM signing. rename to remove the .txt extension and run it in a shell. Tools are provided as-is, without support. Use at your own risk. Read the scripts before using them. You DO NOT HAVE TO USE these scripts, you can generate DKIM keys with any tool you like. Arbitrary section For advanced configuration and custom IP services, see the plugin documentation or source code.

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.