SAR Friendly SMTP

This plugin is just a way to tell WordPress something like: “Please dear WordPress, use my SMTP server to send the emails, not the web server.”

That means that this plugin doesn’t send you emails, when the plugin is enabled WordPress sends your emails using your SMTP server.

If you’re having trouble sending your emails, you can activate the debug mode in settings page. That activates the logging of the commands and data between WordPress and your SMTP server, and most of the time you will find useful information in your PHP error_log file.

Remember to turn off Debug Mode when you’re done with the troubleshooting to avoid raising your server load by generating unnecessary logs.

The location of the PHP error_log file it’s not the same in all servers, because it can be customized by the server admin. In all cases you’ll need to use a (S)FTP client to check it. Example of possible locations:

• Some major shared hosting companies (i.e Hostgator), put this file in the root of your site (i.e. /public_html/ ) with the name of error_log
• Some other shared hostings put it inside of a “logs” directory in the root of your (S)FTP account.
• And unfortunatelly, there’re some hosting companies that don’t allow the user to access directly to this error log file. So you’ll need to contact your hosting support.
• If you’re using a VPS or dedicated server you know how to find this file! 😉 The path of the file anyway is controled by error_log directive in php.ini or if you’re using PHP-FPM by php_admin_value[error_log] in your pool .conf file.
• Where there’s no path specified for the PHP’s error_log file, this information should be added to your web server (i.e. Apache) error log.

If you don’t know how to access to that file or you can’t see any useful information about the sending process on that log file, you need to contact with the support staff of your SMTP server to ask them for the information.

Gmail/Google Apps (and probably other servers too) only allows you to send emails using your account email address in the FROM header.

Be happy man, life is life… Sending an email successfully does not guarantee you that it will reach the destination, an email goes thru many email servers before reaching the recipient email inbox. And finally, if your email reach the server that handles the inbox for the destination email address, it’s this server who has the last word to decide if your email is going to be delivered to the recipient or not.

Lots of things can be considered to reject your emails in destination without any notice: Content of the email triggering spam filters (i.e. too many links in your email content) or recipient server policy, bad reputation of your domain or SMTP IP, missing recommendations (i.e. SPF record)… It’s a whole world man!

I would recommend you to check any of the services below, all of them provide a SMTP server to use and can help you to improve your email delivery.

Mailgun
Sendgrid
Mailjet
SparkPost
Elastic Email
MailRelay
Sendinblue

SMTP Error: Could not authenticate -> This indicates the server refused your authentication data, probably due to incorrect username or password, but other incorrect settings can cause this too (like a bad port or encryption). Double check you have entered correct information in settings and contact with your SMTP server support if all is ok from your side.

SMTP connect() failed -> This indicates WordPress was not able to connect with your SMTP server. Probably you have an error in the hostname, port or encryption settings. This error can happen also if your web hosting is blocking connections to your SMTP host or your SMTP host is blocking your for some reason.

As you know this plugin is made to be friendly with other plugins that makes changes to the WordPress default settings, respecting changes made by these third-party plugins.

Therefore the FROM Name setting is only used when the email has the default value for this field: WordPress

An example of plugin that makes your emails to be sent with the site name is BuddyPress (tested with BP 2.2.1).

Since version 1.1 you can do this. Below you can see an example of use.

define( 'SAR_FSMTP_USER', 'your_username' );
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_PASSWORD', 'your_password' );
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_HOST', 'smtp.example.com' );
// IMPORTANT! Don't use quotes for the SAR_FSMTP_PORT value!
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_PORT', 587 );
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_ENCRYPTION', 'tls' );
// These two are optional. SAR_FSMTP_FROM must be a valid email according to is_email() WP core function.
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_FROM', 'you@example.com' );
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_FROM_NAME', 'Your Name' );

In 1.2 the following constants are added too:

define( 'SAR_FSMTP_DEBUG_MODE', 'error_log' );
define( 'SAR_FSMTP_ALLOW_INVALID_SSL', 'on' );

This is useful if you want to use the same settings network-wide in a WordPress network (multisite installation).