Solid Mail – SMTP email and logging made by SolidWP

Your WordPress website is sending emails out daily, but are your users and visitors receiving them? When it comes to ensuring email deliverability, lean on a proven equation: SMTP plugin + email service provider = success. Solid Mail is an easy-to-use, set-it-and-forget-it SMTP plugin that will help you stop worrying about email deliverability.

❓How does Solid Mail Help You Implement SMTP Email on your website?

Solid Mail makes connecting to many popular SMTP services straightforward and clear. Solid Mail currently supports the following Email Service Providers (ESPs):

• Sendgrid
• MailGun
• Brevo (formally Sendinblue)
• Amazon SES
• Postmark
• Manual connection (connect to any ESP)

Enjoy complete flexibility and reliability in email delivery. Set up multiple connections to send emails via different Email Service Providers according to the From: address, and choose a fallback connection to ensure messages are sent even if a connection fails or the address doesn’t match an existing connection.

Learn more about transactional email services for your WordPress website here.

🤔Why Should You Use an SMTP Plugin for Your WordPress Website Instead of the Native PHP Mail?

WordPress out the box uses PHP’s built-in mail function to send emails such as password reset requests, WooCommerce order invoices and more. The issue? PHP Mail is only as good as your server and most hosts don’t have dedicated PHP Mail monitoring.

Even hosts that specialize in hosting WordPress either don’t offer email services or don’t actively monitor for deliverability. That means you can be at the mercy of noisy neighbors sending spam to purchased email subscriber lists, or spammers running the latest scam. Either way it impacts the health of the server in the eyes of ESPs such as Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and others meaning that most of the time your emails don’t even hit the inbox!

Go from spam-box to inbox with Solid Mail: an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) plugin. Combine with an email service provider such as SendGrid, Brevo, Amazon SES, and others and see your emails start getting delivered.

An SMTP plugin – like Solid Mail – is essentially a higher-level and more advanced method of sending emails between servers that uses a username and password or other secure method to create the connection to an email service provider (ESP). ESPs (like those listed below) provide robust solutions to deliverability issues by running dedicated servers for sending that are managed ‘round the clock for issues like blacklisting, spam removal, and more. In addition they use authentication protocols like SSL/TLS to secure email transmissions and ensure better deliverability.

Using an SMTP plugin combined with an email service provider instead of PHP Mail on the server leads to more reliable, secure, and efficient email communication for WordPress websites. Find out more about SMTP and WordPress email deliverability here.

📑How does Solid Mail Validate Email Deliverability with Email Logs?

Solid Mail gives you an easy-on-the-eyes interface to review and inspect your comprehensive email logs and understand if your email was sent or not. This transparency helps in debugging any email deliverability issues with your website.

Many email service providers offer advanced features like email tracking and analytics. Solid Mail’s email logs help optimize email strategies by making it easy for you to view and act on patterns and trends.

📧 Email Logging is a great way to help troubleshoot WordPress email deliverability issues

But how do you know and validate that your emails are actually being sent from your website correctly? The answer is email logs.

Email logs are crucial for validating that your emails are being delivered as intended, serving as an indispensable tool for troubleshooting and ensuring reliability in communication. These logs provide detailed records of every email transaction, including timestamps, recipient addresses, and errors in the SMTP authentication process.

There are several ways to install and activate Solid Mail for your website. Here are two of them:

Install Solid Mail via the “Add Plugins” screen

To install and activate Solid Mail via your WordPress admin area, navigate to “Plugins > Add New Plugin”. On that screen, go to the search field on the far right top of the screen and type in “Solid Mail” and hit Enter. The “Solid Mail” plugin should be your first result.

In the “Solid Mail” plugin card, click on the “Install Now” button. You’ll see the button change to “Installing”, then it will switch to say “Activate”, click “Activate”. At that point, Solid Mail is active on your website.

Lastly, navigate to the Dashboard, then navigate to “Settings > Solid Mail” and choose your SMTP provider and add your settings. Now your site is SOLID with Solid Mail.

Install Solid Mail via SFTP

1. Navigate to wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smtp and near the top right of the screen, click on “Download.” That will download the wp-smtp.zip file.
2. Unzip the file locally on your computer. That should give you a folder called “wp-smtp” with all the plugin files. If there is a sub-folder in that folder also called “wp-smtp” then we’ll use the sub-folder.
3. Upload the whole “wp-smtp” sub-folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Navigate to your WordPress admin area, and then to “Plugins”. You’ll see “Solid Mail” in your list of plugins, but it will not be activated. Click on the “Activate” link.
5. The page will refresh automatically. Navigate to “Settings > Solid Mail”.
6. Enable and configure your SMTP email provider of choice and click “Save”.

Now your website email deliverability is SOLID with Solid Mail!