Flywheel does not host personal or business email inboxes. Also, default email functionality on Flywheel is limited. Normal emails, such as password resets, will not typically have any issues sending. However, for robust email functionality, monitoring, and scalability, we highly suggest using a third-party email host.
Why? Well, we believe strongly in working with “best of breed” providers for everything we do, and we view ourselves to be a “best of breed WordPress host.” So, instead of hosting email, we are focused on building a great WordPress hosting environment and to be the absolute best at it.
However, Flywheel uses a third-party service called SendGrid to authenticate emails that come from your website which improves deliverability.
In this article, we will explain email limits, why we impose them, and how to make sure your website can successfully send email.
To ensure server stability, we impose daily limits on the number of emails that can be sent from your website. In order to prevent abuse of this limit, we will not share the exact number. The limit is enough to send a functional number of emails, such as password resets, but will not support a full email campaign.
The limits on emails sent from your website vary based on your plan. You can chat with our sales team to discuss your limits or create a customized plan that works best for you!
If you expect a spike in email or anticipate going over your limit, be sure to contact Flywheel Support as soon as you have those details. We’ll be happy to work with you to make sure things go smoothly.
There are several reasons why we impose daily email limits:
Also, Flywheel’s servers are not optimized for sending mail. This means we do not have logs or monitoring available if you experience issues with emails not sending correctly. More robust logging, spam control, and scalability can only come from a true email host.
As part of our anti-spam security measures, a highly unusual spike in emails in a short period of time may trigger a temporary shutdown on email sending from the site.
If your site’s mail is disabled for this reason, the limit will reset every 24 hours at midnight (UTC) and your mail function will automatically be re-enabled at that time. If you need mail re-enabled more quickly, please reach out to support.
eval()
function. That function is already strongly discouraged in official PHP documentation due to its security risks, so it’s rarely used by legitimate themes, plugins, and code.Flywheel will notify the site owner via email when the limit is exceeded.
If you do hit the limit consistently, we will reach out and recommend solutions for you – such as switching to Mailchimp or Sendgrid, or selecting a larger Flywheel plan.
We typically recommend using a third-party transactional mail provider such as Mailgun, Gmail, or Sendinblue.
These services allow you to send emails from a specialized mail IP and will include a higher level of customization, such as more robust logging.
If you need to send newsletters and mass emails, you also want to ensure deliverability. Companies like MailChimp, Mandrill, Sendinblue, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact spend a great deal of time and resources managing their mail IPs. Ensuring email deliverability is one of their top priorities, just like managing your website performance is one of ours.
Flywheel’s infrastructure providers (Google) do not allow mail to be sent over port 25. Any 3rd party provider must support sending emails over alternate ports or via an API.
All outgoing mail from your sites passes through a spam filtering system that looks for key signs of malicious activity before it’s ever sent on to our partner email servers. These include malicious links, spoofed FROM or CC addresses, and more.
Flywheel’s built-in layers of site security already provide a baseline level of protection as well by preventing many of the popular attack methods employed by malware authors. You can read more about Flywheel’s security measures here.
Flywheel now gives you the ability to authenticate your email through SendGrid on the Flywheel dashboard to improve your email deliverability.
Follow these steps to successfully complete sender authentication.
You can always check the status of your domain authentication set-up in the Email Deliverability card on the Advanced tab. An orange banner means that you didn’t finish the set-up and a red banner means that your records didn’t validate correctly with your DNS provider. Double check that the CNAME records are correct and then try again.
Finding out that your contact form submissions are not reaching their destination can be frustrating. Try these tips to ensure deliverability!
Malware authors love unsecured contact and comment forms. If you’ve set up email notifications on your site for new form entries or comments, it’s possible that some spam links or suspicious data could be headed from your site to your inbox. For that reason, we highly recommend the use of CAPTCHA fields to make submitters prove that they are, in fact, not robots.
Another additional method is employing a hidden honeypot field that automated bots will complete, but actual human traffic will not. Many popular WordPress form-builders offer a honeypot functionality as a core feature or as an add-on service.
Emails are best sent with a from:
email address that matches your site’s domain. Trying to send from an email address that doesn’t include the domain could be interpreted as email spoofing. Even if you haven’t set up a particular email address for your domain, like [email protected]
for example, the email will still send.
Use a full email address in the from:
field rather than a shortcode. For example, [email protected]
is better than using “[admin_email]” or “{admin_email}”. However, shortcodes in the message body are typically ok.
Hotmail, AOL, etc. email addresses should never be used for the from:
email address.
It’s not ideal to use the from:
address as the form submitter.
When using reply-to:
, the email address should be different than the from:
email address. In some cases, this can raise the possibility of the message being flagged as spam.
If you are utilizing Flywheel’s built in mail sending through SendGrid, you can improve email deliverability by setting up email authentication. Those instructions are above.
That said, our recommendation is to use a third party, best-of-breed provider for sending newsletters. Not only will these providers support sending to large numbers of subscribers, they often offer advanced reporting and features like A/B testing, RSS email subscriptions, drip campaigns, and more.
Flywheel’s recommended newsletter providers are:
There are many others as well:
And that’s just to name a few.
Flywheel does allow newsletter plugins, as long as you stay within the daily email limits of your plan. Each plan on Flywheel has daily limits on how much “transactional” email it can send.
Examples of email newsletter plugins include (but aren’t limited to):
If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!
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