Back to Notifications Guides

Reliably Sending Emails

This guide applies to:

  • Basic Edition
  • Plus Edition
  • Pro Edition
  • Business Edition

Introduction

In this guide, we want to briefly go over how Simply Schedule Appointments handles email notifications, how WordPress sends emails, and how to make sure your emails are reliably sending.

This is a solution to those who are having email delivery issues, for example emails not delivering or going to spam.

How Your Site Sends Notifications

Fun fact: Simply Schedule Appointments Servers don’t send out your notification emails. Since SSA is self-hosted, this means that SSA is completely run on your site.

Your website and host are in charge of sending your notification emails.

A typical notification email from SSA begins as a scheduled or triggered cron job – these jobs made by our plugin tell your site that it needs to send out an email.

When SSA has a job, our plugin passes that to your WordPress website. Then, your hosting company picks it up for your site and becomes in charge of delivering it.

Think about it like this: SSA writes the letters, WordPress is the mailbox, and your host is the delivery man.

The Mailing Process: SSA creates the email, passes it to your WordPress website, and in turn sends it through your servers.
The Mailing Process: SSA creates the email, passes it to your WordPress website, and in turn sends it through your servers.

Why Sending Emails Through WordPress and Your Hosting is Tricky

You see, hosting companies aren’t the most qualified for delivering emails.

Some issues with Hosting companies include:

  • they limit the number of emails you can send,
  • shared hosting means a bad neighbor can cause your own IP to be marked as Spam,
  • and they commonly lack the ability to properly authenticate your emails. This means that they make up a “From Email” on the spot and don’t make the effort to show that the emails come from a legitimate and active email account.

Here are a couple of articles where you can read more about why hosting companies are tricky:

Reliably Sending Emails

The most reliable way to solve any email delivery issues is to use a dedicated email system.

Free Option – Requires More Setup

The free setup options require a combination of an SMTP plugin with a Mailer service. Many plugins and Mailer companies exist, however we recommend you use WP Mail SMTP plugin along with one of the following Mailer services, each one has a link with a tutorial on how to set it up with WP Mail SMTP:

At the time of writing this, SendGrid was the best free option offering up to 100 emails per day. If you use SendGrid make sure to verify your domain name too.

Video Walkthrough on Setting up WP Mail SMTP and SendGrid

YouTube video

SendWP is an email delivery plugin and platform that handles everything for reliably delivering emails on your WordPress website. Including email logs, analytical reports, authentication – and best of all no complicated setup to get started.

To set this up:

  1. Install the SendWP plugin on your stie
  2. Go to the Tools tab > SendWP > Click “Connect to SendWP” to redirect to the registration page
  3. After signing up, you’ll be redirected back to your site and you’re done!

Learn more about the SendWP email delivery plugin and service.

Still stuck?

File a support ticket with our five-star support team to get more help.

File a ticket

  • Please provide any information that will be helpful in helping you get your issue fixed. What have you tried already? What results did you expect? What did you get instead?
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Related Guides