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Robert GranlundFlag for United States of America

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WordPress SMTP Plugin

WordPress SMTP plugin.  Can any expert recommend a good / free SMTP plugin?  My site is having some issues with sending email. Thank you in advance and happy holidays.
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David Favor
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I too use to use SendGrid... exclusively... for many years...

This as great until I had a delivery problem.

There are only 2x real differences between SendGrid.

1) There's no free option with SendGrid like MailGun. That said, SendGrid runs $10 USD/month, so this is acceptable to me.

2) The real difference relates to debugging delivery problems. With MailGun 100% of all logs of initial submission + every retry + every full SMTP transaction is kept for a few days for free version, longer for paid versions.

Having these logs means any mere mortal can usually debug delivery issues at a glance.

This was impossible with SendGrid (last I used SendGrid). Since I work with many large 1M+ member email lists I must be able to debug delivery issues instantly, without opening a support ticket + waiting on someone else to... maybe... someday... tell me what's wrong...

Check out both MailGun + SendGrid.

For most people, with simple mail requirements, either will work acceptably.

If you're sending a massive amount of mail best stick with MailGun or some other system which maintains a few days of raw logs for quick debugging.
David,

The free version of mailgun only has deferred support (48 hours) and a shared IP. Also, sendgrid keeps logs for 30 days and that should be plenty of time to view any issue. I also keep my own logs for every send I get the response back from the api. I have no personal preference over either though I use sendgrid myself having switched back and forth between mandrill.  You are also potentially talking about something completely different than what is being asked. Most people here are going to be sending hundreds or thousands at a time.

Paid versions are the way to go. You get stability (free versions tend to change without much notice), support and your own IP.
@Scott, SendGrid may have changed.

The 30 days of logs kept, last time I used SendGrid, were only partial logs, rather than 100% of every submission + retry send.

I'm using MailGun free version for 1000s of sites right now.

@Robert, Scott brings up an extremely important consideration.

Shared IP mail sending is preferable for low volume transactional mail.

Dedicated IP mail sending is preferable for bulk mail sending.

So for WordPress sites, using shared IP sending for things like password resets + other common admin email is best way to go, as trying to warm up a dedicated IP with low volume mail... might be impossible... so in this case, you may never get any email delivery from a dedicated IP.

Whether you use pool/shared IPs or dedicated IPs relates directly to email your sending.

Suggestion: Might be good to open another question asking about how best to setup your mail infrastructure, if you're sending bulk email from your WordPress site.
This is getting off topic (though I would always choose a dedicated IP with the paid version)

Anyway, sendgrid has a plug in https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/wordpress-plugin/  So does mailgun https://github.com/mailgun/wordpress-plugin and if you are already using mailchimp, then sign up for the mandrill add on and there is a plug in for that too https://wordpress.org/plugins/send-emails-with-mandrill/