How to Setup WordPress SMTP Email Logs – Track and Fix Emails

Thank you so much for watching the press Avenue YouTube channel my name is John and we talk about WordPress tutorials to help you with your business websites personal websites and everything in between in a previous video we talked about how to guarantee email deliverability from your website using WP SMTP so the plug-in I talked about is right here um it's a WP forms product and it basically replaces the PHP mailer plugin that essentially comes with WordPress and lets you use SMTP from Gmail from Outlook from mail gun and SendGrid a pro option that's available with this is the ability to see an email log so you might be asking yourself John what do I need an email long for and it actually comes up quite a bit when working with nonprofit clients and even larger clients that I work with is how can I prove that WordPress sent the email and an email log does just that it shows hey so-and-so filled out this contact form or they bought this product and the receipt was sent off but XY Caesar server didn't receive it or blocked it or something happen it bounced etc so without a log you would never know any of this information but with a log you would so if I scroll down here these are parts some of these are part of the pro version email log is one of those things you can only do it with the pro version if we take a look at the pricing here I think it's worth its weight in gold especially when working with larger sites but the pro is $49 a year which is super cheap especially for the support you receive it's actually pretty good um you get email controls email logs which is what we're talking about today you can use Amazon SES I believe G Suites and the free one so's this office 365 our outlook is in the pro one where you can connect to those and you that use the SMTP via outlook or 365 send grid is in the free one so is other but you get one year download support and updates and the biggest thing is the support for 49 bucks you couldn't write a plug-in or a custom service to do this anyway so paying 50 is really easy um the 99 essentially just adds this white-glove set up so you can just say hey set this up for me and they do it and that's incredible for 99 bucks especially since they wrote the plugin they can go into your site ask questions and get it done and everything from there up is for developers or agencies at 20 sites or 100 sites which is a ton to get that kind of pro version but as my previous video which I'll link right up here on the top right shows you can do a lot with the free one but the email logs that we're going to talk about today you do need that pro one so to get the pro you pay the $49 or whatever if you're an agency to get it more you log in and you go to licenses and you actually download the WP Mail SMTP pro plugin so it's an add-on in addition to that free one so I'll go ahead and hit download I hit my key but your key would be right here and then once it's download you head over to the website you want to add it to go to plugins and then go to add new this is a minutes wake up there we go we'll go to upload choose there it is install and give it a minute to install you can see in the bottom it says it's waiting for the site so I'll activate it and it just says - because I've downloaded it twice to the Downloads folder WP Rock it's a caching plugin that I have so go ahead and clear that and then it says I was wrong it says it's a deactivate the free one so I thought it was an add-on it's not um so I will so if i click activate it should say it one more time because it cleared it yeah please deactivate but I want to what if an email gets sent so I'll go deactivate let's roll on the bottom activate we shouldn't do that because this site sends a lot of emails so go to clear the cache one more time if you don't have a caching thing don't worry about it but that's what that is all right so now we'll go to settings and then we'll put in our license key so I'm gonna pause it so you don't see it so I paste it in the key and then when you click verify it then says your license key type is Pro and then you can deactivate it I scroll down here everything I previously set up with SendGrid which was simply an API key still remains which is great but now before I could go to email test which is fine so I can send a test email to myself I can go to email log which now says enable log keep a record of basic details from email sent from your site this will allow you to view both general information such as date sent subject email status and technical information of all headers including to CC and BCC for all sent emails what's great about these logs is you have proof that this stuff is working so right now I'm dealing with an error with a client where I can show hey this site is definitely sending this stuff now we just got to work out what happens along the way so I'll say keep keep a record of all content from the emails on your site this may contain personal information so I actually don't want this on I just want the log and the headers so we can go through the technical information to make this stuff work so go to save email controls this again is not on on the free one but it is on on the pro one which is fantastic so WordPress by default will send out emails from many events on your site using the toggles below you can decide which emails you'd like enable comments awaiting moderation you turn that on or off published a comment has been published you can turn that on or off site admin email change attempt those are great to leave on site admin email changed I leave all that stuff on reset password request success the actual request itself the password changed email changed attempt email changed and then personal stuff user confirmed export erase request admin erase data status so failure for background updates me I might turn that off it depends and then a full log of updates and then new years is created so you can turn all those off it's controls you otherwise wouldn't get anywhere else which is great and then under miscellaneous these are all available to you when you have the free version so I just turn off the announcements because I've Twitter and Facebook and I see it all on there anyway and then I hit save so that's it for the email log we'll give it a few hours to stack up some emails so we can show you the log itself I said I was gonna wait hours but stuffs already coming in and about I think it's been 15 minutes not sure not that long um so email log up here on the main screen is simply to turn this on on the left-hand side under WP male SMTP you'll see email log so go ahead and click that and here's a bunch of gravity form submissions but it could be any form sake v WP form contact form seven anything that tells WordPress hey send an email out and this thing crapped it and gets it so I'll just click this bottom one here the test email to myself and it shows the email details so it says over here on the far right it says log details the mailer was send grid there are no attachments and this particular log ID happens to be one and then you can delete it email details it was created today at 1:40 p.m. it went to me it was from them and this is the subject so that's kind of the very basic the technical details which is hidden in this accordion says a little bit more information so it says the date who is from the message-id the mailer which is WP male SMTP slash mailer slash SendGrid and then has the number probably the version what it was the version etc so this snippet here you can send to your IT guy or mail department and say hey this was sent out do you see this what happened was it blocked etc I will say if you want to drill down further within SendGrid mail gun Pepe PO all of them you can find those headers by searching and see hey the mail server rejected it or it bounced or whatever error code happened to see if you are receipts or notifications or emails or leads or anything that your site produces via email is coming to you or your recipient so it's a nice way to see that WordPress is doing what it should have been doing in the first place well again thank you so much for watching my name is John I love creating WordPress tutorials on YouTube just for you we have a Facebook group facebook.com slash press-fit sorry facebook.com slash group slash press Avenue is our group this is our page itself within the community group you can ask questions about this tutorial or any other ones or anything we haven't covered lastly this mailing plugin WP mail smtp it's in the wordpress repo if you just search for this and you can do the free one and get mail sent out very easily or you can get the pro one on their website for the pricing we showed before i do think this is a must-have for agencies for any e-commerce sites or ones that are generating a lot of leads and that need those emails to go out to several people you never want to drop the ball on the stuff you want to make sure you're on it so thank you so much for these guys for producing this product again give us a thumbs up if this was helpful leave a note in the comments I love talking you guys and replying and just seeing what you're up to and if this helps in any way shape or form lastly go ahead and hit that red subscribe button and the bell next to it and you'll be notified of more wordpress tutorials just like this thank you so much for watching