Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Recommended Software and Scripts > WordPress > WordPress SMTP Mail Plugins

We don’t recommend WordPress plugins designed to make your mail get sent via SMTP — instead, just remove those plugins and use the built-in WordPress email sending system.

If you’ve ever needed an SMTP mail plugin like “WP Mail SMTP” with other hosting companies because your mail was unreliable, that’s because the other company’s mail system was set up incorrectly for PHP scripts. Ours is set up properly, including proper DKIM signing, and it will work.

The only time this isn’t true is if you host your DNS elsewhere (which is rare), and you haven’t added the proper DNS records to allow our servers to “sign” your mail. In that situation, though, the fix is just to make sure you add all the necessary DNS records.

Adding an SMTP mail plugin just makes your mail less reliable. If you use SMTP, your script will fail to send email if the SMTP server is temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. That’s because SMTP is designed for sending mail between mail servers that know how to try again a few minutes later if the receiving mail server is unavailable, but your script won’t know how to do that.

In contrast, PHP mail is designed as a way for scripts to submit outgoing mail to mail servers. It uses the server’s “sendmail” function, which accepts the mail from your script, stores it, and tries delivering it to the SMTP server. This normally takes just a fraction of a second, but sendmail will happily keep trying for as long as necessary to successfully deliver your messages. Using it makes your script much more reliable.