Improve Email Delivery from WordPress Using SMTP

A fairly common problem in WordPress is that, for various reasons we’ll discuss in this article, emails sent from the platform are automatically filtered as spam. In this brief article, we explain the problem and provide the recommended solution to prevent it from happening again.

Why are emails filtered?

Emails sent by WordPress often don’t have proper formatting: they are generated via PHP mail, and the sender is not defined by default. WordPress uses [email protected] (your site’s domain). The actual address may vary depending on the plugins and server configuration.

This causes the filters used by many email providers—such as Gmail or Outlook—to automatically filter the emails, since a similar sender address can be an indicator of potential spam.

Sending WordPress Emails via SMTP

If we configure WordPress to use an SMTP account—instead of PHP mail to send emails—this will help improve their reputation with providers’ filters. This lends greater credibility to our emails, reducing the chances of them being filtered.

There are many plugins that can help with this. We recommend FluentSMTP. Why? Because it’s very easy to configure, and we can set it up using the details for the SMTP service we’re using.

If your site is hosted with us, simply send us a support ticket and we’ll take care of configuring it.

FluentSMTP Configuration

After installing the plugin, we need to add an email connection. Select Other SMTP:

Next, go to the SMTP settings. There, we’ll use an email account on our domain that has been created beforehand.

Enable SSL and Authentication to validate our emails.