Introduction

In this guide, we want to briefly go over how Simply Schedule Appointments handles notifications, how WordPress sends emails, and how to make sure your emails are reliably sending.

This is helpful to those who are having email delivery issues, like emails not delivering or going to spam. For more information on how to troubleshoot email delivery, please see our other guide: Email Delivery Issues

How Your Site Sends Notifications

Fun fact: Simply Schedule Appointments Servers don’t send out your notification emails. Since SSA is self-hosted, this means that SSA is completely run on your site.

Your website and host are in charge of sending your notification emails.

A typical notification email from SSA begins as a scheduled or triggered job – these jobs made by our plugin tell your site that it needs to send out an email.

Think about it like this: SSA writes the letters, WordPress is the mailbox, and your host is the delivery man.

When SSA has a job, our plugin passes that to your WordPress website. Then, your hosting company picks it up for your site and becomes in charge of delivering it.

But, this is when things get a bit tricky.

Why Sending Emails Through WordPress and Your Hosting is Tricky

You see, hosting companies aren’t the most qualified for delivering emails.

Some issues with Hosting companies include:

• they limit the number of emails you can send,
• shared hosting means a bad neighbor can cause your own IP to be marked as Spam,
• and they commonly lack the ability to properly authenticate your emails. This means that they make up a “From Email” on the spot and don’t make the effort to show that the emails come from a legitimate and active email account.

Here are a couple of articles where you can read more about why hosting companies are tricky:

• How to Fix Emails Not Sending by MailPoet
• WordPress not Sending Emails? 2 Easy Ways to Improve Deliverability by MailPoet
• Why You Should Never Send Email with WordPress by MailPoet

Reliably Sending Emails

The most reliable way to solve any email delivery issues is to use a dedicated email system. You’ll need to use a combination of an SMTP plugin with a Mailer service.

Many plugins and Mailer companies exist, we recommend you use WP Mail SMTP plugin along with one of the following Mailers:

• Mailgun 
• SendGrid 
• Sendinblue

Each one has a link with a tutorial on how to set it up with WP Mail SMTP.

At the time of writing this, SendGrid was the best free option offering up to 100 emails per day. If you use SendGrid make sure to verify your domain name too.

Video Walkthrough on Setting up WP Mail SMTP and SendGrid

Related Guides

• 

  Email Delivery Issues

• 

  Scheduled Event and Cron Errors

• 

  Email Message Errors

• 

  Change the Sender Name and Address