How to Fix Wordpress Email Sending Problem

After the plug-in update/install problem was solved, seems like I have another problem of my WordPress.  For my Contact Page , I am using a plug-in called “Fast and Secure Contact Form” to handle the message left on my blog; the plug-in will use PHP’s mail function and redirect the message to the email address I set in the setting page of this plug-in.  Normally I won’t notice if there is any problem of the plug-in, but recently a reader told me he never receive any reply from the message he left on my contact page, and I am sure I never received any email from the plug-in neither.  So I logged out my WordPress and did some testing, and confirmed that the mail function doesn’t work any more on my blog.

I googled online for solution but people were all suggesting to check if mail() got disabled.  I checked through my php.in I was sure the mail() function was not disabled, so I guess this is some sort of miscellaneous problem that I couldn’t solve that easily.  I then found that I could actually use my own SMTP to send out emails. I found using SMTP to send out emails is actually better than using PHP mail module because when an email is sent out, if you are using PHP mail module, the emails are easily be considered to be a SPAM mail.

The solution is quite easy, all you need to do is to install a plug-in call “wp-smtp-mail“.  Since I use Google Apps to host my @rockia.com email, I can even take advantage of Google’s SSL encryption to make sure the security of my emails.

The setting is quite straight forward, here is my sample setting:

From Email: info at rockia.com  (the at is supposed to be @, this is the email you would like to send out emails.)

From Name: Rockia.com (this is the name the email receiver will see)

Mailer: Send all WordPress emails via SMTP

SMTP Host: mail.google.com

SMTP port: 465 (because I am using SSL encryption, if you don’t want to use SSL, here is other ports you might be able to use for Gmail: Gmail Configiguring)

Encryption: SSL
Authentication: SMTP

If you are using Gmail as your sender email, the setting should be pretty much the same, otherwise you will need to check your email providers’ setting online.

Post Note:

I found there was a security problem of this plug-in, when you type in your password in the setting, it’s visible so that it’s not safe to configure your plug-in in public.  However, you can follow my instructions here to fix it:

1. Click Edit of the plug-in in the plug-in page

2. User your browser’s search function. In my case, it’s Command + F  (If you are using Windows, it’s Ctrl + F):

Search the following line (you can just copy this line and past to your search box):

<input name=”smtp_pass” type=”text” id=”smtp_pass”

3. Change the “text” to “password” as shown in the following picture:

4. Save. And you are ready to go.