As I covered in July 2023 in DKIM & SPF now achieve even better email deliverability when fully implemented, thanks to an unexpected catalyst, for those who have their own domain professional or personal domain, successful email delivery has become increasingly more detailed. In fact, for common Gmail and Yahoo recipients, they both recently became even more stringent than before, now also requiring DMARC in addition to DKIM and SPF records. This article is not a rehash about how to accomplish that and assumes you already have that done perfectly, since they are now obligatory and no longer optional. This is about how email that comes from your website can take advantage of those three established records for proper delivery. Prior to the most recent tightening of the screws, many websites could use PHP for outgoing mail from the website (as long as the three aforementioned records were properly established. That changed recently, so I need to research, choose, install and properly configure a plugin to allow continuous delivery. Ahead, I’ll cover when this matters, when it doesn’t and why I chose and continue to use FluentSMTP (free) after so many implementations.
What is always required now?
Your domain must have proper records now for DKIM, DMARC and SPF, no matter what. It also must be properly include any other authorized SMTP services for your domain, including any email campaign service, i.e. Constant Contact, Elastic Email or Mailchimp.
When a plugin like FluentSMTP doesn’t matter and is not required
FluentSMTP and other similar plugins facilitate sending mail from your WordPress website, not from an email client, webmail from another provider or email campaign service like Constant Contact, Elastic Email or Mailchimp.
When this matters
- E-commerce sites that sends messages to clients, including receipts, order confirmations and links for digital products you sell, as well as order confirmations to you
- Password reset requests (if you don’t have passwordless logins) or Magic Links, as I covered in Passwordless logins for your website: Are you using Passkeys or Magic Links?
- Auto responses from a contact form
- Delivery from a contact form to you and/or the sender
- Other situations I many not recall as I write this
Options available from FluentSMTP
FluentSMTP currently offers the following sending options (in alphabetical order):
- AWS
- Brevo
- Elastic Email (my current provider for email bulletins)
- Google Workspace
- Mailgun
- Microsoft
- Netcore
- Other SMTP (the one I have used successfully countless times)
- PHP
- Postmark
- SendGrid
- SparkPost
So far, I have only used FluentSMTP with the Other SMTP option, most frequently with the website’s own SMTP server, except in those cases where the website domain uses Google Workspace.
Even though FluentSMTP indeed supports using the Google Workspace, I don’t use it. In my experience, both in the remote past and in the very recent past (in the past month), Google seems to make use of its SMTP server for anything other than its own webmail or apps to be increasingly more difficult to to use. Both in the remote past (with other plugins like FluentSMTP) and within the past month with FluentSMTP, it seems as if it is impossible to document the proper setup at Google’s end, since Google constantly changes it and makes it increasingly difficult. As a result, the documentation provided by FluentSMTP (or any other company) no longer matches what is available at Google’s end. Google makes it increasingly more difficult to accomplish use of its SMTP server from anything other than its own webmail or its own apps.
What I like about FluentSMTP
- The free version is the Pro version. The developer, WPManageNinja, promises that FluentSMTP will always be free with no upsale to anything higher end version. They do it since they make enough with their other products and consider this one should be free forever.
- It tests the connected SMTP server to let you know you got everything configured correctly.
- It allows sending a test message, either HTML or not-HTML.
- It can resend if the connected SMTP service is not immediately available.
- It allows connecting to more than one SMTP if a backup is desired.
- It offers detailed logs.
Conclusions
If you already configured your domain records properly for DKIM, DMARC and SPF, you’ll have no problem installing and configuring FluentSMTP. If you already host with TecnoTur, we’ll configure DKIM, DMARC, SPF and FluentSMTP at no extra charge. If your hosting company won’t do this for you within your hosting service, either migrate your website to TecnoTur or contract a consulting session to help you configure DKIM, DMARC, SPF and/or FluentSMTP. For more information about FluentSMTP, visit FluentSMTP.com
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