If your blog needs to send out masses of emails, let people subscribe by email and send notifications of new posts - Post Notification (PN) is one of the most important plugins you can install.
The plugin is quite simple to use. You can add email addresses manually, or let your readers subscribe on their own by following the clear integration instructions. But sometimes it just doesn’t work.
photo via Flickr
The Signs of a Problem
The thing is, even if you follow the instructions correctly, things may still not work for you. The first sign that something is wrong is that subscribers don’t receive the initial ‘verify your subscription request’ email. This means that they can’t verify they actually asked to subscribe, and will never receive post notifications.
Adding subscribers manually, through the plugin’s management page will sometimes work - i.e. send the email - and sometimes won’t. Eevn if it does send the initial email, your subscribers will not receive subsequent post notification emails. Yep, you’ve got a problem here.
The Plugin is Just Fine
Don’t blame the plugin. It is just fine, assuming you installed and configured it correctly. There is any number of things that can go wrong. There is a good chance that you missed a step in the setup of the plugin, but if you didn’t - this post deals with another tricky problem - email sending.
Web Hosting and PHP’s mail() Function
Some web hosting companies do not have the right configuration for php mail. There may not always be a simple solution, and this can be quite frustrating. But what can you do?
The PN documentation suggests using wp-mail-smtp plugin together with PN. Wp-mail-smtp replaces PHP’s mail() function with a piece of code that lets you configure your own SMTP server for sending emails. The plugin’s documentation even shows you how to configure it to use Google’s gmail smtp (note the specific settings for port and SSL/TLS encryption).
The wp-mail-smtp plugin should take care of the web hosting configuration problem. But this may not be the end of the story.
WP-MAIL-SMTP Does Not Work As Well!
You install wp-mail-smtp, you configure it with the relevant properties for gmail (or any other external email) but it still doesn’t work. Even when you try sending the test email from wp-mail-smtp’s settings page you get a problem - sending returns false. You recheck your settings but everything seems to be in order. What went wrong?
Well, there’s a chance that your hosting provider, in its infinite wisdom, blocked SMTP access to external emails. You did everything right, but you can’t change the firewall settings, and your hosting provider will probably be reluctant to change it for you. You are stuck.
The Solution: If You Can’t Beat Them - Join Them!
You don’t really need an external email’s SMTP server. Every hosting provider will surely let you set up email boxes with them, and this is what you need to do. Find how you set up an email on your hosting, and find the smtp settings for it. The SMTP server you need to use should be found in your hosting documentation or support channels. Enter this into the “SMTP Host” field on wp-mail-smtp settings page, and the username and password for the email you set up with your hosting. You should be fine now!
Take GoDaddy, For Example
Many users on Wordpress forums and elsewhere complain that they can’t get Post Notification and wp-mail-smtp to work with GoDaddy hosting. This is because GoDaddy may sometimes not configure php’s mail() correctly, and they also apparently block gmail’s smtp in their firewall configuration.
So, if you want to configure wp-mail-smtp with GoDaddy, you need to do the following:
- Get an email address with them
- In wp-mail-smtp settings, enter the name of your mailbox etc.
- For the SMTP host field, enter
relay-hosting.secureserver.net.
No encryption is required, and you don’t even need to enter your uesrname and password. - Try sending a test email. It should be fine!