New user here, so I hope I posted to the right category, apologies if not, and please tell me where is right. I’ve got the site set up, want to use gmail for smtp email. Read the documentation on this recommending WP Mail SMTP plugin for WordPress sites. Wondering if maybe Gmail SMTP plugin, or one of the others, like Easy WP SMTP, might not be a better path. I’m on a shoestring budget here. And I’m not a green newbie at website tech, I’ve even rented an unmanaged server and managed it myself - back about 13 years ago. Built and maintained an opt-in only list of thousands for a nonprofit.
So I’d like to maintain as much flexibility as possible - like maybe using free email providers other than google, or being able to send more than a single gmail account will allow - without adding to my monthly expenses, cause I’m on a fixed income here. A quick skim of the choices indicates that Easy WP might provide the most flexibility. And the WP Mail SMTP plugin costs $50 to use Office 365, Amazon SES or Outlook.com. But there’s a lot of misinformation out there. And I want this part to be easy to set up and maintain; my patience for jumping through convoluted hoops isn’t what it used to be.
What sort of experiences have you folks had using the various Wordpress SMTP plugins with InfifnityFree? Or does pretty much everyone just use the [WP Mail SMTP by WPForms] plugin like the documentation recommends?
I’m not sure if the plug-ins you found are compatible. PHP IMAP and SMTP functions are disabled, but there is a KB on how to do it, if you are willing to invest a little time to write your own plug-in.
Yeah, been poking around a bit more. Looks like Easy WP Mail is aging, not supported frequently. And it also looks like the WP Mail SMTP plugin, which is the one recommended by the knowledge base here, does allow using most mail services (yahoo, outlook, office 365, etc) without buying the Premium for $50. The Premium adds (as I’m interpreting their description) Microsoft, Amazon SES, and Zoho Mail setup pages that are simpler than digging out all the provider protocols individually and wrestling them into place. And bells and whistles like logging and resending. Plus it’s the most widely used wordpress smtp plugin by far.
So since my concern was that the WP Mail SMTP plugin would limit my future options, and I now know that’s not the case, I’m just going to go with it. I just like to plan ahead and avoid roadblocks well before I’m about to impact them.
Very good! Avoiding problems that don’t even exist
Yes, that is the plugin I used on my website before I moved away from WordPress. It works well (Except for the company enjoys sending click-bait emails, I blocked them).
Made me think of the reply Golda Meir is said to have made to Henry Kissinger who, during the 1973 Sinai talks, accused her of being paranoid for hesitating to grant further concessions to the Arabs.
I couldn’t find any rules or guidelines for posting on this forum, so I’m using hints I’ve seen to post my solution to my issue here. A bit of background: I started in the IT industry selling services back in '82. The technical knowledge I learned was very broad and shallow; I just needed enough to sound intelligent in front of diverse clients who were engineering types. When the internet became a thing, I decided I should learn a bit more, being as all my daily contacts were with technical gurus. Just for the street creds.
So to get more performance from my dial up connection, I dug in and discovered Trumpet Winsock. Which led to my discovery of open source software. I was just amazed that all these people were coding solutions without getting paid a single cent! Wow. And ever since, open source has always been part of every search for sw I do. Then things got muddied up with the Shareware and other schemey stuff. And now the “Freemium” model. My reaction, to paraphrase the police sergeant in the opening scenes of The Matrix, was “You give me that free but paid crap, you can cram it up your @**”. My point is that I just couldn’t settle for WP Mail SMTP without exploring all the other options (my adult son has compared me to a bulldog on numerous occasions, he has a point too).
So in poking about, I discovered FluentSMTP. It’s open source, and the authors have publicly vowed that it will forever remain open source. The reviews on Wordpress dot org are quite enthusiastic. Plus I’d just knocked Easy WP Mail for being long in the tooth; and it occurred to me that maybe WP Mail SMTP was too, and that trying out the new kid on the block would be a good choice. So I installed FluentSMTP.
The setup for gmail went flawlessly on the first try. Their setup video is OK up until you reach the OAUTH part, stop there if you aren’t already very skilled with google’s development tools. But the documentation is great; way better than the average plugin docs, and it got me through to success right off.
I’ve been testing it out, and it’s been working perfect. I’ll post again if I encounter any issues at all: I’m eventually going to try setting it up for Outlook dot com and Yahoo mail as well. And up until a week ago, I hadn’t touched tech stuff since 2011, so my sites are brand new and I’m sure I’ll be using it for a whole lot more, and using it in different ways, as I develop them. But so far, I’m really appreciating Fluent.
If I discover problems, or more successes with outlook dot com and yahoo, should I just add a new reply to my original post? And is there any documentation that spells out the rules and guidelines for the forum?
