Understanding email deliverability - WordPress Tutorial

- There's one potential issue you might run into with any form plugin, and that's email deliverability. What that means, is that your form plugin tries to send an email and for whatever reason, it doesn't go through. That can be a big problem if you have email notifications set up, and you never get notified. The reason this happens is that many web-servers are designed to send HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. They aren't designed to be email servers. When regular web servers send emails, they are sometimes lost, and sometimes they're marked as spam. You don't want your notifications being marked as spam, which is why you should look into an SMTP service. An SMTP service sends emails for you, and for most businesses, you send so few you don't need to pay anything. So before we install any contact forms, we want to install an SMTP plugin so the emails sent from our WordPress site are sent correctly. The nice thing is that no matter what form plugin we use, the SMTP plugin should work correctly. There are a couple of options here. Mailgun is the option I use on my sites. It's free, up to 10,000 emails per month. Pretty great, right? SendGrid is another option, and I've used them before. They also allow you to send thousands of emails per month. WP Mail SMTP is a plugin that connects your site to an email account, and email is sent through that account. That's useful if you use Google Apps and you have an account for info@yourbusiness.com that sends all of these notifications for you. Since my site notifications are mostly for me, I won't be using an extra email account just for notifications. I'll be using Mailgun for this site. If you want to go the extra mile and create a special email account just for notifications, you can follow this tutorial. I'm already logged into the WordPress site that I'll be using for this course. We'll be using the Topsy Turvy Cake Design brand for this course. Let's install the plugin. I'll go to plugins, add new, and I'll search for Mailgun, and I'll click install now when I find it, and activate. Now let's got to our Mailgun account, which I'm already logged into as well, and under our Account Settings under our profile, then click Account Settings, and then under Security we can see our API Keys. We're going to need our API keys and enter them into the plugin. So I'll reveal the API Key and copy it, I'll go back to plugins, settings, and now Mailgun, I'll put in the API Key right here. The only other thing we need from Mailgun is our Mailgun domain name. Go back to Mailgun. I'll click on Domains. And we can see my Domain name right here. I'll copy that, go back to my site, and paste it in right here. Let's scroll down. We'll click 'save changes' and once the page reloads, click test configuration. And you should see something that says 'Mailgun test success'. That's it. Now you can check your inbox and make sure that it comes through. Or, you can always check the logs in Mailgun. They're handy to look through in case you think something is getting stuck in a spam filter. You can see if it was actually sent. Assuming you see the email in your inbox, then you're good to go. Your mail is being routed through an email service, which is much more reliable than a web server. If you don't see your test email here, or if you got an error when you pressed the test configuration button, then you may need to add an authorized recipient to your Domain in Mailgun. These services are always fighting spammers, so just make sure to read through their documentation in case they added any extra steps. Once you're ready, there's nothing stopping you from getting a boatload of emails about completed forms.