Like almost every website, you probably have a contact form on yours to make it easier for visitors to communicate with you. After filling it out, you expect an email to arrive at your contact email address, but you wait in vain. You’ve already checked the form settings 100 times, you’ve checked the spam folder in your mailbox…. nothing anywhere. After the email, it was as if the ground had collapsed.
Why doesn’t it work? Why am I not getting emails?
By default, WordPress sends emails via the PHP function. However, most hosts block such emails to protect against spam from your website.
How to solve it?
In order to send emails from the site correctly, you need to change the way they are sent. Instead of the built-in PHP function, you need to send them via SMTP protocol, just like when you send mails from your mail program, e.g. from Outlook.
There are several plugins that can provide this. Perhaps the most popular is WP Mail SMTP, which currently has 1 million downloads in the official WordPress repository. I also use this on all the pages I create.
However, in order to use it, you must have access to a mailbox that allows you to send mail via the SMTP protocol. But you probably won’t have that available on some free mailbox. However, if you have a website on your own domain, you also have the ability to create emails in your hosting program, so you should be able to send emails from these mailboxes via SMTP.
Before installing WP Mail SMTP (or any other similar plugin), it is advisable to first create a mailbox from which you will send mail. For security reasons, I recommend creating and using a separate account for this purpose, e.g. wordpress@vasadomena.sk, which you will not use for any other purpose than to send emails from the site.
After setting up the mailbox, you just need to configure WP Mail SMTP correctly(configuration sample) and sending emails via the contact form should start working. This will solve sending all emails from WordPress. You can get the necessary data for configuration from your hosting company.
