Hi @basquenet,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us! I’m glad to hear you enjoyed the design aspect of WPForms—that’s something we work hard on. I completely understand the frustration around setting up a SMTP plugin to improve email delivery. Setting up a a mailer for an SMTP can be intimidating and in case it helps, I’d like to share more details why this step is important, not just for WPForms but ensuring that emails from other plugins on your site are delivered successfully.
Emails from a WordPress website (such as form notification emails) are sent through the PHPMailer (I’ve also included a short article on this here). In such cases, your email reputation is based on your server and the various records that are set up on the server (SPF, DMARC, etc).
Sending an email via SMTP will authenticate the email by checking things like the email header, the content of the email, any links included in an email, etc. By going through this authentication process, emails sent through SMTP are much more likely to be delivered to their final destination.
We have a great guide that takes you through setting up SMTP?here: https://wpforms.com/docs/how-to-fix-wordpress-contact-form-not-sending-email-with-smtp/ The WP Mail SMTP plugin mentioned in that guide does have a free version that you could download to try out and they offer limited support on their WordPress support forum.
If you’d like, our support team would be happy to help guide you through the setup and answer any questions to make the process easier. We’re here to make sure everything runs smoothly for you. Just contact us by opening a new topic on or support forum!
Thanks again for your feedback, and we’re here if you need us! ??