How to send WordPress email through FounderMail

The short answer. Install the WP Mail SMTP plugin, choose the Other SMTP mailer, and enter smtp.foundermail.mx, port 587, encryption TLS, authentication on, username the full mailbox address such as hello@yourdomain.com, and the password from that mailbox's page in the FounderMail dashboard. Send the test email. That is the whole configuration, and the settings table below has every field.

The reason to use a mailbox rather than a sending service is the part most guides skip: when a customer hits reply, the answer arrives somewhere you will read it.

Why WordPress email fails in the first place

Out of the box, WordPress hands its mail to whatever the web server offers — a program called sendmail on the hosting machine. That machine was bought to serve web pages. It has no reputation as a sender, usually no permission to claim your domain, and often no working mail software at all. So the mail either never leaves, or it leaves looking exactly like the forged mail that spam filters exist to stop, and Gmail drops it silently.

This is why contact form notifications never arrive, why "reset your password" is the most common support request on a small site, and why WooCommerce order confirmations end up in junk. Nothing is broken in WordPress. It is asking the wrong machine to send.

What SMTP is, in one paragraph

SMTP is the protocol mail servers use to hand messages to each other. Configuring "SMTP" in WordPress means telling your site: do not try to send this yourself — sign in to this mail server, as this user, with this password, and let it send. It is the same thing Apple Mail or Outlook does when you add an account. Your site becomes one more mail client, sending as a real mailbox that really exists on your domain.

The problem with sending services: replies go nowhere

The standard advice is to sign up for a transactional sending service and paste its API key into WordPress. It works, and it delivers. Then this happens:

• Your form sends "Thanks for getting in touch" from hello@yourdomain.com.
• The customer replies to it with the question they actually wanted to ask.
• The reply is delivered to hello@yourdomain.com — an address that does not exist, because a sending service only sends.
• The customer gets a bounce, or nothing, and assumes you ignored them.

Sending services are built for mail nobody answers: receipts, alerts, one-time codes. The moment your site sends anything a human might reply to, sending alone is half a product. What you want is a mailbox: something that sends and receives, at the same address.

That is what FounderMail gives WordPress. The mailbox your site authenticates as is a real mailbox on your domain, with IMAP, a sent folder, and an inbox you can open. A reply to a contact-form notification lands in it, grouped with everything else that person has ever sent you, whichever address they wrote to.

Before you start: your domain has to be set up

Mail will not leave until your domain is verified for sending, which is separate from verifying it for receiving, and until the domain is allowed to write first. The first three steps are DNS records you add once at your registrar, and the dashboard prints exactly what to paste. In order:

1. Add your domain and publish the ownership record — a TXT record at _foundermail — plus an MX record pointing at smtp.foundermail.mx and an SPF record. This is the receiving half, and it is what makes mail to hello@yourdomain.com arrive.
2. Enable sending on the domain, on its Sending tab. FounderMail issues three CNAME records unique to your domain. Publishing them lets outgoing mail be signed with your domain's own DKIM key, which is what tells Gmail the message really is from you.
3. Create the mailbox your site will send as. hello@, support@ or orders@ — mailboxes are unlimited on every plan, so make one just for the site if you like. It is created with a password for IMAP and SMTP.
4. Request outbound access on the domain's Outbound tab. A new domain may only answer mail it received, and nothing WordPress sends counts as an answer, so without this the site sends nothing at all. It is reviewed by a person, usually within a day. See below for what to write.

The settings

These are the same settings any mail client uses, so they also work in Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird or any other WordPress SMTP plugin. Every value is on the mailbox's page in the dashboard, with a copy button beside each one.

The From address is not a free field. Whatever WordPress puts in it, the server rewrites the From header to the address you authenticated as. This is deliberate — it is what stops a compromised site sending as somebody else — but it means setting From Email to anything other than the mailbox address achieves nothing. Set it to the mailbox address and turn on Force From Email so plugins cannot override it with the WordPress default.

Step by step in WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is the plugin most WordPress sites use for this, and the free version does everything described here. Other plugins have the same fields under the same names.

1. Get the mailbox password. In the FounderMail dashboard open Mailboxes and click the mailbox. Its page has a Mail client settings card with every value above and a copy button beside each one, and the password below it with Show and Copy. It can be revealed at any time, it is only for IMAP and SMTP, and it is not the password you sign in to FounderMail with.
2. Install the plugin. In WordPress, Plugins → Add New, search for WP Mail SMTP, install and activate it.
3. Skip the setup wizard's provider list. FounderMail is not on it. Choose Other SMTP, or close the wizard and go to WP Mail SMTP → Settings.
4. Fill in the table above. Host, port, TLS, authentication on, username and password. Set From Email to the mailbox address and tick Force From Email.
5. Save, then open the Email Test tab and send a test to an address you can check — ideally a Gmail address, because Gmail is the strictest reader you will face. A failure here prints the server's own reason, which is a sentence rather than a code.
6. Check it arrived, and check it is signed. In Gmail, open the message, use Show original, and confirm SPF and DKIM both say PASS. If DKIM fails, the three CNAME records from step 2 are not published or not yet visible.
7. Reply to it. This is the part that separates a mailbox from a sending service. Your reply should appear in the FounderMail inbox within seconds — the same mailbox your site just sent from.

Now test the thing you actually installed this for: submit your own contact form, place a test order, or run a password reset on a test account.

What your site is allowed to send

FounderMail meters volume rather than mailboxes, so the plan decides how much your site can send, not how many addresses you have.

The daily cap is the one to read carefully. On Free and Plus a site may send 100 messages in a day; Pro and Scale have no daily limit. A contact form on a small site sends a handful a day and will never notice. A shop sending an order confirmation, a dispatch notice and an invoice per order is sending three per sale, and the arithmetic is worth doing before you rely on it.

Counted against the allowance is every message that leaves, including the copies WooCommerce sends to you. Received mail is metered separately and replies from customers come out of the received allowance, not this one.

Your site needs outbound access, whatever it sends

This is the second thing that stops a first attempt, and it catches everybody, not just shops. Every domain starts in reply-only mode: it may answer a message it received, and nothing else. A reply, here, means a message that carries the In-Reply-To header a mail client sets when a person hits reply.

WordPress never sets that header. A contact-form notification, a password reset and an order confirmation are all new messages as far as the rule is concerned — even a form notification addressed to your own inbox. So a site in reply-only mode sends nothing, and every attempt is refused with "can only reply to people who have written to it".

Request outbound access on the domain's Outbound tab, say in a sentence what the site sends ("contact-form notifications and order confirmations from our WooCommerce shop"), and wait for the review — usually inside a day. Replying by hand from the dashboard or a mail client keeps working throughout, because those messages are real replies. Do this before you launch, not on the morning you launch.

Once approved, the plan's new recipients per day figure in the table above applies: a new recipient is an address that has never written to you. A newly approved domain also starts below that figure and earns its way up as days pass without bounces. Ten to a hundred new people a day is a founder writing to customers; it is not a shop with a thousand daily orders, and it is not meant to be.

When FounderMail is the wrong answer

Worth saying plainly, because a setup guide that pretends its product fits everything is not worth reading.

• High-volume transactional sending is not what this is for. If your application sends thousands of automated messages a day — receipts, alerts, notifications at scale — use a service built for that. The allowances above are sized for a company's correspondence, and the honest read of 3,000 a month on Free and Plus is that it is a contact form and a small shop, not a platform.
• Marketing email does not belong here either. Newsletters and announcements go through Campaigns, which starts on Pro and has consent, an unsubscribe link and an allowance of its own. Pushing a list through WordPress and SMTP costs a domain its outbound access.
• If nobody ever replies to your site's mail, the thing that makes FounderMail worth the setup does not apply to you, and a sending service is simpler.

The sweet spot is the ordinary one: a site whose mail starts conversations. Contact forms, enquiry forms, booking confirmations, a shop small enough that customers email you about their orders. That mail deserves an inbox.

Two things worth knowing afterwards

Staging sites, and mail that must not reach real people

A mailbox can be switched to capture mode, where mail your site submits over SMTP is stored in the mailbox and delivered to nobody. Point a staging or development site at a capture mailbox and you can place a hundred test orders without a single real customer receiving anything, while still seeing every message that would have gone out. It is off by default — a new mailbox sends for real — and it is chosen per mailbox on its page, under Capture sent mail (for testing). Send mail for real switches it back, which the domain must be verified for sending to allow. Sending from the dashboard is never captured.

If you lose the password

Mailbox passwords cannot be chosen or edited. The only way to change one is Reset password on the mailbox page, which generates a new one; the dialog warns you in as many words that the current password stops working and that every mail client signed in with it will be refused until you enter the new one there. That includes your WordPress site. Reset it when you can update WP Mail SMTP straight afterwards, not on your way out of the door.

Troubleshooting

A refused message is never silently dropped. WordPress is handed the server's reason as an SMTP error, and the plugin's Email Test tab prints it. The sentences above are the server's own words, so they will match what you see.

What you end up with

A WordPress site that sends signed mail from your own domain, and a real inbox behind the address it sends from. When somebody replies to a form notification, an order confirmation or a password reset, the answer lands in that mailbox, threaded with everything else that person has ever written to you, across every address on your domain. Start free — no card, unlimited mailboxes on every plan, and the DNS takes a few minutes to undo if it is not for you.

Related

• Getting started — the account, the domain and the first mailbox.
• Domains and DNS — every record, and what each is for.
• Mailboxes and mail clients — the same settings for Apple Mail, Outlook and phones.
• Sending and outbound access — every check an outgoing message passes.