Contact Form Emails Not Sending or Going to Spam (deliverability issues explained) | EP 634

Contact Form Emails Not Sending or Going to Spam (deliverability issues explained)

1. Common Issues 01:04
2. Debbie P mail SMTP  03:08
3. Paid delivery service04:16
4. Secret third option06:00

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast brought to you by WP Gears. I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:37 David Blackmon: Today we’ve got a super exciting technical topic seems like we’ve had quite a few of those in row episode 634. We’re  going to talk about why your contact form may not emails may not be sending, or why your emails are going to spam. So we’re gonna kind of cover some things why it’s happening but we’re also going to give you some tips into end tricks to help solve the problem for you as well.

01:04 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely! So first things first let’s kind of talk about as David mentioned what the issue is and why it happened.  So basically websites are configured to load web pages right web or website servers are configured to load web pages right and so they’re not really configured for sending emails. And so when WordPress sends emails so the work the emails that WordPress can send, it can be anything from a password reset email when you forget your password, or one of your customers forgets a password and email receipt. If you’re using a ecommerce plugins such as WooCommerce or EDD a form submission. So for example you have your built in contact form on your theme or      page builder or you’re using something like Gravity Forms. Those are all emails that WordPress has to send and it’s using the web server to
send that. However the web server as I mentioned isn’t really configured to be sending emails it’s configured to be serving web pages also if you’re on cheap shared hosting, chances are your IP address has already been blacklisted by different email services like Gmail, and so forth and so those are that’s kind of the the basics for why it happens. And so because it’s not configured to be sending email and because of like shared servers shared IP addresses. The IP address can get blacklisted and so it ends up going to spam or not getting delivered at all. Even can some happen. And so it’s a very common problem. Whether it’s your contact form or an email receipt or this or that and so basically what you want to do is you want to get the emails that are being sent by your website server by WordPress and outsource it to some sort of service that specializes in sending emails. And so we’re going to talk about a couple of those options. Now the first one on the list and I’m gonna talk about and then Dave is gonna talk about the next one is a free plugin it’s brought to you by WP Forms, I want to Sayid Bell keys companies and the plugins called Debbie P mail SMTP buy WP Forms and it’s a free plugin. If you type in WP Mail into the WordPress repository you’re going to find it. But basically it allows you to use an SMTP which is stands for simple mail transfer protocol for sending emails. And so for example you can use a gmail account to send your WordPress emails instead of your website server. And so we won’t get into all the technicalities on how it
works and so forth but it can be a really cheap and easy way to send emails on. And I would say that’s a good really cheap and easy way to send emails on and I would say that’s a good solution for small sites not e-commerce. you know you’re not sending a lot you maybe have a occasional contact form submission being sent that sort of thing that can be a really good solution. However if you’re an e-commerce site and you have a lot of traffic a lot of users customers a lot of things happening. A lot of emails being sent. Then we  recommend the next thing that Dave is going to talk about. 

04:16 David Blackmon: Yeah. The next thing is a paid email delivery service and we use them. There’s a couple of options out there that are pretty popular in common. One of them is called Singrid and the other is Mailgun. And they essentially do the same thing there’s just a paid
service where Singrid or Mailgun they are an email service provider. Basically their servers are optimized to get your emails delivered from your website and it’s a paid service and they’re pretty inexpensive you know. So we have a couple of pretty highly trafficked youmurrs websites and Aspen Grove Studios dot com, Divi space. Tim has Debbie dot life you know. And there’s a lot of transactional emails going out and stuff. And we pretty much have no problem whatsoever and we use Singrid.  I’m not sure if Tim uses Singrid or Mailgun, I think you use the Singrid also. But we also use it on WP Gears for our course and our students and stuff. And it’s just it’s easy and it works you know. So if you want to make sure that your emails are getting Cine sent out use one of these paid services you know. We’re not going to go into the details of how exactly they work and stuff but their servers are optimized to send emails and they’re constantly reviewing when something gets blacklisted making sure
that you’re those IP addresses and stuff aren’t blacklisted. And stay clean and stuff and debris deliverability is probably very very high in the high 99% if not 100 percent I don’t know what they guarantee but it I highly doubt that guarantee 100% but..

06:00 Tim Strifler: Ya know definitely! And I just wanted to clarify just in case there’s any confusion here transactional emails is the emails that
wordpress sins and they call it transactional. Because something’s happening whether you’re trying to get a password or you’re buying a product you know. WordPress is sending an email in response to some sort of action and so that’s why it’s called transactional. This is not to be confused with the email that you set up for your company. Like for example to be able to send emails out to you know your customer you know you know or your internal team and stuff this is not like your John at your domain.com email. That’s something different, that’s not what we’re talking about here and we’re also not talking about email marketing. Emails like MailChimp and so forth that’s again a little bit different and so this is only transactional emails and so David you asked what I use. I actually don’t use a single or Mailgun I use the secret. The secret third option that we didn’t list on here and that and that is Mandrel. Mandrel is actually a by MailChimp and so you have to have a paid MailChimp account in order to use Mandrill. And it’s a paid add-on and so I use it just because I’m used to MailChimp and so I’m kind of in that world already and so I use Mandrel MailChimp. And so I’m kind of in that world already and so I use I use mandrel for for sending transactional emails but
it works well. But yeah, if you don’t use MailChimp SendGrid and Mailgun are both great options. I’ve used both I’ve used Sengrid probably a little bit more on client sites and stuff and then as David mentioned we use Sengrid for WP Gears Com. 

07:42 David Blackmon: Awesome! Well tomorrow we’ve got another great topic how to reduce WordPress database bloat. This is an important one folks so make sure you  tune in. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

07:56 Tim Strifler: Take care bye bye.