Allow wordpress@domain to be set to a user-specified address, and allow configuring SMTP server - for phpmailer

[johnhennmacc]

I am having an issue with a blog of mine where the email containing the password doesn't always get to a visitor. Other emails such as those sent when a comment is left on the blog arrive as expected yet a registration email sent to the same account never arrives.

[mrmist]

Most probably being caught by over-zealous spam-blockers, as the functionality works, and your server is capable of sending the emails.

Anything special about their email addresses or your hosting?

[johnhennmacc]

I agree with you on the spam-filtering business. Would it better for WordPress to allow you to set your own email rather than use wordpress@…? I currently use the Mail from plugin for this but it might have been better if it was built into WordPress from the outset.

[mrmist]

Not sure about that. I think there have been other tickets about it.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

yeah. in particular, there is one that suggests removing the from: field altogether.

[jasmineaura]

This is a must. Surprised this has not been implemented till 3.1. This has been standing for over 3 years now (see Ticket #5007)

@Denis-de-Bernardy:
Try sending an email without a from field to google/hotmail/yahoo/whatever-domain you like, and see if you get it. Certainly, not! Not only is a from field required, many mail servers out there check the envelope sender's domain-name to see if it exists in DNS (properly resolves) and some do check if it *has a MX record* (MX = Mail eXchange; an SMTP server). Definitely scratch that idea, please..

Several issues, besides the envelope sender's MX record checking issue arise, and which are probably affecting many users (especially those in virtually-hosted environments) without even knowing it:

1. If the domain at which wordpress is hosted does not have mail server setup, any email destined to a non-existent user will be lost. Admin doesn't even get notified that the newly registered user (or whatever else) does not have a valid/active email. Not very cool when your blog gets flooded with spam-bots' registrations.

2. If wordpress is hosted on a sub-domain (say blog.mydomain.com), wordpress will send out mails as wordpress@…. Certainly, people don't create mail-domains called "@blog.mydomain.com". Wanting to catch emails sent by that address and bounced because the visitor's/registrant's email does not exist means one would either have to: a. edit wordpress hardcoded code in *several places*, or, b. create a mail-domain for the "blog" sub-domain and then create a mailbox/forward/alias for wordpress@…, both quite tedious, and quite undesirable, because a. on wordpress upgrade, the code-edits are lost (and wanting to change that email later means digging again through several places in the code), and b. changing subdomains means needing to delete old subdomain-mail setup, creating a new subdomain-mail setup and consequently new wordpress account on that mail sub-domain.

3. Some hosting providers do not allow sending mail from the server to the outside world (blocking all outgoing tcp connections to destination port 25) except through a designated SMTP server. There should be at least the ability to define SMTP server to use for phpmailer in wp-config.php!

Hard-coding this stuff all over wordpress code-base is not only bad, it's a complete mess..

[nacin]

I think this is a wontfix/worksforme/duplicate.

1. You can fully customize the PHPMailer object that gets set up and fired in wp_mail() using the phpmailer hook, which passes the object to your callback, so you can do what you wish to it.

2. You can fully override the wp_mail() function all together.

3. You can fully filter both the from name and from email, using the wp_mail_from and wp_mail_from_name filters.

There have been previous discussions on this, specifically #5007 and I'm sure elsewhere. In order to support the greatest breadth of server setups, the current wordpress@ isn't going anywhere.

[nacin]

Also --

The ability to define an SMTP server is provided by at least one plugin. It does not belong in core.

There has been talk about a button/tool you can use to test emails sent from WordPress. I am not sure if there is a ticket somewhere for that, or if someone has created a plugin for it. I guess I could.