 Awesome. Hope you're having a great WordCamp. So I'm Janine Parris. I am a project manager at Big Boom Design here in Asheville. We build, fix, and maintain WordPress websites. And just to get kind of a sense of where everybody's at, who here has ever had trouble sending website messages from their WordPress site. Yep, okay. And who here kind of already has a sense of what SMTP is? Sweet, awesome. And anybody using an SMTP plug-in right now? Cool. All right. Well, I'm hoping that there's going to be something here for all y'all, and no matter kind of where you're at. So the goal is to get those website emails going and keep them going. And I'm not talking about Gmail. I'm not talking about MailChimp. I'm specifically talking about the emails that your website sends usually automatically to you and your customers. And here's how we're going to make that happen. We're going to talk about some basic plug-in settings that can help make your emails more deliverable. We're going to talk about what SMTP is and how it's used. And then finally, we're going to talk about why it works and why we have to do all this stuff. So the best thing, the first thing, the most important thing you can do to make your website emails deliverable is to correct your plug-in settings. Every message that your website sends should be from your site name and from your site domain. So recipient servers evaluate a few things before they send messages on to their addresses. They look at one of the most important things, which is the reputation of the domains and server IPs associated with a given email, right? And it's important to keep in mind that we're trying to build a really clear and consistent picture of who is sending any individual email. Mismatched Info is a red flag for recipient servers. It doesn't necessarily mean that you are a bad dude trying to do some bad stuff. But it's not a good sign. It's one of the things the bad guys do to try to hide what they're at. So we want to make sure that we're doing our best to be really clear about who we are as a sender. And I feel like there's a little more detail that we need to get into about that, right? So when every message your website sends comes from a different name and a different email address that builds or detracts from the reputation of your server, right? We talked about that to begin with. But what happens is that that information can actually linger. For example, right now, you could be sitting on a server that someone else has damaged with poor email sending practices. You could be using a domain that maybe was registered previously that has those pieces of information associated with it. So what you want to do is make sure that you've done all you can do to be clear about who you are as an email sender. So let's take a look at what that actually means in terms of what you're doing in WordPress. So this is a really common e-commerce plugin, WooCommerce. And when you install and activate WooCommerce, you go into the settings, you go into the email tab, and there it's pretty clear, pretty straightforward, you've got your from name and your from address, and that should be your business name and your business email address. And that makes sense, right? It's a store, you know, you want your stuff to show up any time your customers get a message from you. Where people get a little confused, where it can be a little confusing for folks, it's something like contact form notification. This is a big pitfall for people. So this is gravity forms, and it looks a little more complicated, but basically it's the same. We've given, in this case we've given our notification a name. We have set a send to address that's just coming to us. Sorry, this is from the Big Boom Design website, so, you know, info at bigboomdesign.com. And then down here at the from name and from email address, that's where people get tripped up, because in a contact form you could click that icon on the right, and you could actually pick out the fields that your user is filling out with their name and their email address. And what ends up happening is that when that notification goes out, that information is in the header as the sender instead of you. But their email server, that information doesn't match your website server. That name doesn't match your site name. So now a recipient server could reject that message. At best it might be marked as spam, at worst it might be dropped entirely, and you really don't have a way to know. So you've taken all this to heart. You've gone back, you've checked all your notifications. You've made sure that your sender information is super perfect and it's exactly who you are. You've made sure that all your colons and all your brackets are closed. But there's still no emails. No emails. Or maybe you have a website that has had no problems for years. You've just been chugging away. You've been sending emails with no problems and then you switch to a new hosting company or you upgrade maybe to a dedicated server. And now your reliable font of website messages has dried up. Or maybe you're launching a brand new website and your business absolutely depends on those order notifications and those emails out to your team letting people know various things like your business depends on that stuff, right? Or maybe your health is deteriorating as you lay awake at night just wondering what's happening to all those emails. Then friends, it might be time for SMTP. That's the wrong direction. Yeah. All right. So the first thing I'm going to tell you about SMTP is actually the least important thing you could ever possibly know about it. And that is that SMTP stands for simple mail transfer protocol, right? And what SMTP is is a relay service that grabs your outgoing messages and gives them a little extra boost of authority before sending them on to recipient servers. But it does other things for you as well. It's sidesteps, potential server complex, and it's kind of like your cool friend, you know, getting you past the line and the party. Usually you have to pay for consistent, reliable SMTP service. There are companies out there that offer free service tiers, right? But if you do get a service, an external SMTP service, then you get a little extra value, right? You get things like error messages. You get things like a peek into what your emails look like to recipient servers. And you get information about what happens on the other end, you know, what happened when the message got to the recipient. And all that's pretty valuable. Now, to return to our party analogy, you've been kicked out of the party. Now you're standing on the sidewalk, just wondering why no one's making eye contact and people smile weird when you compliment their accessories. Well, with SMTP, you might still be kicked out of email party, right? But when you shout why to the heavens, you're presented with a nice list of time-stamped faux pas, which is kind of a nightmare, but it's really helpful when you're actually talking about email and not people. So you may have heard that some folks SMTP without an external service. Maybe you know someone who uses an SMTP plug-in and all they did was install it and activate it. And they say it works fine for them, solve their problem, kind of like a lamp that just lights up without being plugged in. And that can work, but the reasons that it works are going to sound a little familiar to you now that we're here at this particular moment, because if you install and activate your SMTP plug-in, right, and you go into the SMTP plug-in settings, what do you find? You find a spot where you can set a from name and a from email, just like in all of your other e-commerce and contact form plug-ins. And now what the plug-in is doing, still grabbing all of your outgoing messages, it's adding in that information that you put in the settings, and it's sending them on. The difference is that when we don't connect an external service, right, the plug-in isn't sending them on to another server, it's sending them on to recipients directly. But because you've provided a consistent sender block, your emails are more deliverable. The durability of this solution depends on things that are not really in your control, changes to the SMTP plug-in that you use that isn't connected, remember, to an external service. What updates to that plug-in can change its functionality, changes to your server settings can interrupt whatever the plug-in is managing to do. You may find that if you choose to go this route, you have to do more stuff, get an external service, or make some edits to your WP config file, it's actually possible to do some of this yourself, or a lot of it, all of it, possible to do all of it yourself if you care to. And the place where you would do that in WordPress is that WP config file. So all of this kind of leads us up to our last piece, which is the WP mail function. The WP mail function is a little piece of PHP code that is a wrapper for another piece of PHP code. Every time your WordPress website sends a message, this function is engaged. There are some problems with the WP mail function. It's not great getting that from information. It kind of can only work with, you know, it doesn't know stuff automatically. You have to tell it what you want it to do. So if somebody has set up a contact form plug-in or something that doesn't put that information correctly, then we're not going to have it in there. It's been a security risk over the years at different points. And because of these things, hosting companies really, they don't like WP mail. They really don't. And some of them preemptively disable the function. None of them provide the kind of error reporting that you get from an external SMTP service. And, you know, they're just not excited. They're just not that excited about you sending a bunch of emails from your shared server using this potential security risk, right? So all of that to say, we want to make sure that we're doing all that we can on our end to engage well with our recipient server. So that means setting that from information correctly. And we want to make sure that if we need to, we know what tools to use, like our external SMTP services. So what do we know? We know that websites send email from websites, not from users. We know that for WordPress websites, WP mail isn't universally supported. And we know that SMTP can give us a little extra information and a little extra authority for our outgoing messages. So I know y'all are raring to go. Not go, because there's another speaker coming up, and he seems pretty great, but metaphorically go and check all your notification settings and look at all your plugins and maybe do some stuff in your WP config file and all that cool stuff. So I'm not going to keep you from that dream. I am Janine Paris. If you want to meet the fine group of folks that I work with, a lot of them are actually right here in these front two rows. Thanks, guys. We also have a booth out on the hallway, and I myself will be at the happiness bar after this to answer questions and or look at pictures of your pets. Bye.