Episode 104 – Your Sent Emails

Transcription was done by Rev.com, using their AI (artificial intellegence) generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video or listening to the episode.

Where does a cow hang his photos in a meme? welcome to episode 104 my name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz, the chief community officer here at Imagely, and you're listening to the WordPress photography podcast. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that comes up quite often in the Imagely support inbox, and it's not something that is specific to Imagely, but it's actually WordPress in general. Now, WordPress utilizes a PHP function and it that is a function that sends email through your server and this, this is called WP mail in the WordPress side, PHP mail, and the PHP side. That programming language PHP, which were presses built on. Now what happens is if you get a new order and your customer gets the email you get, the email comes, sometimes comes from [email protected] sometimes it's website that your host.com sometimes it's a random email, a thing that doesn't make sense, and sometimes if you're lucky, you're in your host and servers set up perfectly, it will actually come in from whatever your admin email addresses.

But that's not always the case. So here's how to get control of this. You're going to install a plugin called WP mail, S. M T. P. this is a freemium plugin, meaning there's a free version and a paid version for most people. The free version does exactly what you need. Now SMTP stands for a simple mail transfer protocol. It is something that has existed since 1982 and this basically controls sending emails so when you install WP mail SMTP, there is going to be a wizard to walk you through setting it up, but basically you want to make sure that you have set up your from name and you're going to force that from name. You're going to have a from email address and you're going to force that from email address. Then you are actually going to choose where you want your email to be sent from. What platform.

Now built into the free version are a bunch of things like default. If you want to just try to override the default settings of your server, but I don't recommend that there is Gmail outlook and then other SMTP all built in. Meaning you can actually with a few clicks connect your Gmail account and have that go and be able to send email through your Gmail account. What does that actually, what I do personally from my photography website, and if you have a G suite like I do, it works just the same. If you want to go with other SMTP, you just have to know your SMTP information, which again is from your email provider. Now hopefully your email provider is actually separate from your host because that way you're not relying on the same servers or your website in order to send emails. Hopefully it is completely separate.

That is work. So what I do, so for example, my domains with hover, my hosting is actually with WP engine and my email is actually through G suite or Gmail. So there are three separate things, which is good. That's a safe way to do things. That means not everything will go, can possibly go down at the same time and reduces some risk. Now if you do not use any of these and you want something different like Amazon SES or SendGrid or Mailgun or send in blue or anything like that, there is a paid version of of WP mail SMTP that you can upgrade to and have more control over that. It gives you some, it gives you some other things as well. For example they have a white glove setup thing. If you pay, there's a some email logging if you pay, although there are free email logging plugins that you can install if you want to see the emails your site is sending.

But what's cool is once you set this up, there's also an email test feature that you can actually email yourself. A test ended up show that it's coming from what you set up. So that is how you take control over what is or how rather your, your emails are being sent. Now I have to give a shout out to Felicia. Man, she gave a nice five star review on the podcast. She said, very good podcast for photographers. I enjoy listening to the topics covered so far. Very good tips given, and this is snapshot by ivan.com so I want to say thank you to Felicia and Ivan who are the principal photographers and owners of Ivan's photography. If you want to learn more about taking control over how your emails are being sent, just go to the show notes, imagely.com/podcast/104 I will link to the how to article that we have about this in on the Imagely blog and I will also link to the free plugin that you can install yourself anytime. If you have any questions, comment, and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode.