The One Type of WordPress Plugin You Should Never Use
- Use only well coded plugins that aren’t going to slow down your site 01:19
- Install only neccesary plugins. 01:30
- The WordPress plugin you should never use is a newsletter type of plugin. 04:16
- When you send out emails using a newsletter plugin which relies on PHP and WordPress mail functions, there is a great chance that your emails will land in your user’s SPAM folder.03:04
- We recommend using an email service provider. 03:15
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“When you send out emails using a newsletter plugin which relies on PHP and WordPress mail functions, there is a great chance that your emails will land in your user’s SPAM folder.” This is so much rot. I have several clients using MailPoet to send emails using local server email, and delivery is 100%. Delivery is dependant on the reputation of the domain, which in turn depends on setting things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC up correctly, and nothing to do with the language (PHP) used to submit the email to the server.
Your statement is disingenuous, inaccurate and simplistic.
Hi Will,
That’s great to hear that your clients have 100% deliverability using Mailpoet and their web server to send email, however, that’s usually not the case. As for the PHP, we were referring to “PHP Mail” which is what the WordPress mail function utilizes (wp_mail) to send email through the web server, opposed to using a third party email server. PHP Mail is widely accepted as not being a reliable way to send emails, especially in bulk.
You are correct that domain reputation is important for deliverability, but server IP address is much more crucial. So when you’re on a crappy shared host with hundreds of other sites, it’s very common that emails will go to spam, regardless of domain reputation. That’s why we always recommend using a transactional email service such as Mandrill, Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc., or using SMTP to send emails.
Hope that makes sense. But, that wasn’t the point of the episode. Even without the deliverability issue (which can easily be circumvented with a transactional email service), it’s still not a good idea to use a newsletter plugin within WordPress mainly because of the database bloat. General rule of thumb: only use WordPress for things that need to be done with WordPress.
I agree with the both of you 😉
PHP mail is used for so much more these days than notifying the site owner of stuff happening. What about WooCommerce? Imagine invoices not reaching consumers. Anti spam tools these days are built not to just look at the server IP. Yes, it might be used for spam by a compromised account, but does it mean all accounts are compromised? IP addresses are used as part of the signature and yes it can trigger a small warning score for other senders on that same IP. But if your server and DNS are set the way they should, you can run your own mail services without issue.
But as I said, I agree with the both of you. Use WordPress what it’s built for. If you want to host your own mailinglist service, download and install software that does just that on your service. You do not want to slow down your front-end visitor because WordPress suddenly needs to send out huge stacks of e-mails.