1

We are working with an outside company to develop a website for us. This new website utilizes a contact form that sends an email to a generic email account which is one of our Exchange accounts and handled like all other incoming outside mail.

This vendor is having problems getting the new WordPress website to work sending these messages using the default WordPress SMTP mail settings. The web development company has been working with the web hosting company to try to solve this issue, but after several hours they have not gotten it to work for some reason. The web development company suggests these settings work for all of their other client sites using the same development style and hosting company, and they are unsure why ours is not working.

They have offered a solution of incorporating a 3rd party service, such as SparkPost, to handle this mail. We suggested that we’d still prefer to use WordPress mail setting as opposed to this other 3rd part solution. In order to use this 3rd party service, we need to simply add a couple of entries to our DNS.

We are not necessarily comfortable with using this 3rd party product instead of the native functionality. I understand there are pros and cons of going either way, so my questions are:

  1. Is it widely considered bad practice to send email from WordPress?

  2. Is 3rd party solution “better” than using WordPress to email contact form results to a company email account?

  3. Are there inherent security risks or unintended consequences of going either way that we should consider?

1 Spice up
2
  1. What are you sending? In small scale that’s fine, don’t use it to send massmail
  2. Wordpress itself usually does not send emails anyways… it just sends it to your SMTP server and that guy sends it via your mail server.
  3. Newer versions of Wordpress auto patch when there is an update, but depending what version you have you want to be careful. A pervious company I worked for had their Wordpress design outsourced as well and the developer were so bad, they said they couldnt update wordpress without breaking the website… lol
1 Spice up
3

Neally covered it already. And also, yes, developers may and frequently do create things which WP updates break. Stay vigilant…

4

Hi guys,
Thanks for responding Neally and Jeff Jones. It is basic information being sent from a contact form. Definitely small scale, emails will are only sent on form submission (assuming no bots are trying to use our forms). It sounds like we’ll need a SMTP server/relay somewhere anyway then regardless of it being SparkPost or something else as WordPress doesn’t technically do it; am I understanding that correctly?

Yes, the ongoing gift of WordPress is plenty of updates to stay on top of and crossing your fingers nothing breaks when you apply them. :slight_smile:

5

Likely problem is that the mailserver is set to require authentication when the sender’s address is a local one. If so three workarounds are available:

  • Configure the form to use SMTP auth.

  • Make the sender’s address one at a different (but valid) domain.

  • Make an auth exclusion for the webserver’s IP address.

6

Than @ianmacdonald3 we’ll look at that too.