If you have a WordPress powered website with user signup or registration (for comments or a community) then those visitors will receive a welcome email (on signup). The email is 3 lines of text with only the username, password, and wp-login.php URL.
Nearly every website owner would like to have additional information in that signup email, and some would like to have a different (or no) login URL, because they have a login box exposed on the front end.
The trouble with this situation is, if you figure out how and where to make these changes in WordPress – you have to make them in WP core files. This means that (if you manage to make the changes) in the future when you upgrade WordPress (and it’s core files) your changes will be overwritten and you’ll have to make them again (and again, and again). It’s never a good practice to edit WordPress core files.
Enter the SB Welcome Email Editor plugin. This plugin provides several features where you can:
- change the admin welcome email notification
- change the user welcome email notification
- you can send email ‘reminders’ to users using a template
- you can edit the email subject
- you can edit the email body
- you can edit the email ‘from’ address
- you can edit the email ‘reply to’ address
- you can send email as HTML or plain text
- you can add additional email headers
One of the main problems with WordPress and forms and sending outgoing email is that many webhosts, ISP’s, email providers all filter out incoming email without valid from or reply to field. Some webhosts (depending on how email is setup) will take your outgoing emails and make the reply to or from email “wordpress@domain.com” instead of the admin usersname (causing the email to go into spam folders for many people). In some cases spam filters will eat the email before it’s even received.
So with this plugin you have the ability to not only make your signup notification more user friendly – but also to ensure that more people receive it.
How to Send WordPress email via SMTP
Another consideration is changing the way that outgoing WordPress emails are sent. By default WordPress sends email out using PHP which (on Linux servers) goes out using “sendmail”. This is hosting server based outgoing email (not email server). Sending emails out this way is not always without it’s own issues, and a safer way to send out email (again ensuring that more people will receive it and it won’t be marked as “spam”) is to make WordPress outgoing emails use an actual email server and “SMTP”. You can even set it up to use SSL or TSL (secure) email ports and or / Gmail to send.
Here are two great current and updated plugins you can use to do that:
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