How do we know if an email was sent successfully/received?

  • Resolved stephunique

    (@stephunique)


    9 months, 1 week ago

    Hello

    I am testing out this amazing plugin, it is truly fantastic and has lots of features and is very useful.

    I know there is an email log. I did a test where I set the “from” and “reply” email address in the plugin settings to a disposable email address as opposed to my real email address since I am emailing test users with public disposable email addresses that anyone can see and I didn’t want to reveal my real email address. Then I sent an email to selected users (they are test users with disposable email addresses). The email was not received, but it was logged in the email logs as “EMAIL SENT”. When I changed the “from” and “reply” email address in the plugin settings to my real email address, the test users received the test emails (then I deleted them immediately so people can’t see my real email address).

    This begs a question:

    SMTP often have a limit on how many emails they allow you to send in a given time period. Now, I am not a developer so please alllow me to ask a question: does this plugin rely on an SMTP to send the emails (I don’t currently have an SMTP installed since all the plugins I use send their own emails just fine)? What I am fearing is this: suppose I have a lot of users and there is a limit to how many emails I can send in an hour and it is less than the number of users I need to send emails to. I select all the users that I need to send emails to, click “send”, and it gets logged as “EMAIL SENT” by the plugin, when in actual fact it was not received by some of the users. I guess I would never know who didn’t receive the emails and those people would never get the message since I won’t know to send emails to them again in an hour after the hypothetical SMTP limit resets.

    So I am wondering how I can know if the emails were actually received.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Suman Bhattarai

    (@metalfreek)

    @stephunique Your concern is valid. I will try to explain the caveats.

    This plugin is basically a bridge between your users data available in your site and your SMTP provider. Plugin itself will not use any SMTP services on its own. It will try to send email from SMTP service you have configured in your system. This SMTP services can be sendgrid, mailchimp or even your hosting email service. Plugin will just use whatever is available.

    As you have mentioned, there are limits to number of email that can be send in all cases. This is why you need to know the limit of your SMTP provider and try to send emails by staying below those limits for better delivery. For this Email Users page has filter available that allows you to select small range of user at a time by filtering them using their ID range. If you have lots of users and small limits, you will have to manually come back and send emails by using ID range filters. Pro version fixes this by using queue system but for free version, its manual. Lets say you have 1000 users and your limit is 500 emails per day (most have limit per hour or even limits per minute), in this case you will send 500 email by choosing users from ID 1-500 today and another 500 emails tomorrow by choosing ID 501-1000.

    Regarding delivery, this plugin detects obvious errors on your system and let you know if there are errors. Plugin can figure out if there are SMTP service credential error and other system related stuffs. But once plugin sends email, it goes to your SMTP provider and at that point there is no way for plugin to know if SMTP provider actually send those email properly. So, its advisable to use SMTP service providers that logs email activities such as success or failed deliveries.

    I hope this has cleared some of your confusion. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

    Thread Starter stephunique

    (@stephunique)

    Thank you Suman for the fast response! I understand the issue now, your explanation is clear to me. I now also understand what the queueing function in the pro version is for.

    I do have some follow up questions. Since I am not using a specific SMTP plugin/provider, does that mean my hosting provider is being the SMTP provider? How do I know who is the current SMTP provider?

    If I then get a separate SMTP provider such as sendgrid or MailChimp, does your plugin know to use them or do I need to tell it to switch to the SMTP?

    And for the pro version, would there be a setting in the plugin where I can tell it what the SMTP limit is so that it can queue the emails appropriately, or would it know some other way?

    Plugin Contributor Suman Bhattarai

    (@metalfreek)

    @stephunique

    Since I am not using a specific SMTP plugin/provider, does that mean my hosting provider is being the SMTP provider? How do I know who is the current SMTP provider? -> If you are not using any plugin/provider, then your hosting is your email service provider. You can continue to use it to send emails but they do impose limit so you need be aware of those limits and send email staying below the limit.

    If I then get a separate SMTP provider such as sendgrid or MailChimp, does your plugin know to use them or do I need to tell it to switch to the SMTP? -> If you opt in for SMTP providers, you will use plugin like WP Mail SMTP to configure the email credentials. Once you do that, this plugin will pick that up automatically and will send email with that. You don’t need to do anything.

    And for the pro version, would there be a setting in the plugin where I can tell it what the SMTP limit is so that it can queue the emails appropriately, or would it know some other way? -> There is a setting where you can configure how many emails you want to send every five minutes. This settings basically deals with the issue of staying within the limit of email service providers.

    Thread Starter stephunique

    (@stephunique)

    Thank you for the detailed reply!

    I have set up an SMTP service using my hosting provider and I can confirm that the emails are sent successfully (the plugin picked up the SMTP service) and received when I sent a test email to a small group of 3 email addresses. There was a notification when using this plugin that said 3 emails were sent, one successfull, two failed (the 2 failed ones were because they were disposable email addressess and I used another plugin to block disposable email addressses) and I checked the first successful one, and it was received.

    So I will close this support thread now, thank you for your help!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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