Send WordPress email through Sendwax with WP Mail SMTP
The most installed SMTP plugin on WordPress. Takes about two minutes.
The values
In WP Mail SMTP → Settings → General, choose Other SMTP — not a named provider, since we are not in the list yet — and enter:
| Host | smtp.sendwax.com |
|---|---|
| Port | 587 |
| Encryption | TLS / STARTTLS |
| Username | sendwax |
| Password | a send-only API key from API keys in the dashboard |
| From | an address you have approved under Senders |
The username is literally sendwax for everybody — the key is what
identifies your account. Use a send-only key: it can send mail and nothing else, so a key
sitting in a settings screen on shared hosting cannot read your contacts.
Step by step
- Set From Email to an address you have approved under Senders in Sendwax.
- Tick Force From Email. This is the one that matters — see below.
- Set From Name to whatever you want recipients to see, and tick Force From Name.
- Choose Other SMTP as the Mailer.
- Fill in the values in the table above, leave Authentication on, and save.
Force From Email is not optional here
WooCommerce, Contact Form 7 and most form plugins set their own From address, usually wordpress@yourdomain.com. Sendwax refuses any From address that is not an approved sender — that refusal is what stops a leaked key sending as your CEO — so without Force From Email some of your mail sends and some of it is rejected with a 550, which looks like Sendwax working intermittently. It is not: it is two different From addresses.
Checking it worked
WP Mail SMTP → Tools → Email Test sends a real message. It will appear in your Sendwax activity log within a second or two, with its own id.
What else to know
We do not relay your message byte for byte — we read it and build a new one that our DKIM signature covers, which is what makes the reporting and the unsubscribe handling work. It costs you inline image placement, threading and a few other things, all listed on the SMTP relay page. Worth two minutes before you point production at it.
If you are writing the code rather than configuring somebody else's, the API is the better door: a message id per recipient and an error you can read, instead of a three-digit reply your framework swallowed.
Other setups
- FluentSMTP — Free, open source, and happy to hold several connections at once.
- Post SMTP — Keeps its own email log and can alert you when a send fails.
- Easy WP SMTP — The plainest of them. Nothing to configure beyond the connection.
- Gravity SMTP — From the Gravity Forms team, and the right choice if your forms are theirs.
- WooCommerce — Order confirmations, shipping notices, password resets. The ones customers notice.
- Postfix — Everything on the box — cron, monitoring, mail(1) — goes out properly signed.
- Laravel — Two lines of .env. Or use our package and skip SMTP entirely.
- Python — The standard library, no dependencies.
- Nodemailer — The usual way a Node app sends mail.