Google doesn’t like how we use the mail() function of wordpress. It keeps stating the email might be dangerous, etc… Eventhough we are emailing ourselves using the same domain.
We are now wanting to implement a transactional email provider to avoid mail() not passing Google’s and possibly other’s mail requirements. From my understanding if the email is authenticated through a transactional email provider, there is a higher chance that Google won’t think we are bad actors.
Gravity Forms has add ons for PostMark, SendGrid, and MailGun. Is there any feedback the community can provide me as I research these 3 services and deploy them in my Gravity Forms over the weekend?
All three should be able to get you where you need to go. I am personally partial to Postmark, all the email related to Forgravity.com and our products gets pushed through Postmark. I’ve however used Sendgrid and Mailgun to success on other projects in the past.
The main reason I prefer Postmark is their logging, it is both easier to use and they keep logs for a longer amount of time than the other two relays, we actually recently moved from Mailgun to Postmark for this reason.
I was leaning towards Postmark because their pricing was understandable and they had good reviews. Logging is very important to us. Great to know Postmark does well here.
My vote is for SendGrid. Although I’m sure Postmark is great as well just haven’t tried it before. (perhaps I should look into it.) SendGrid is free for I believe up to 2,000 emails a month and I have used it on almost 10 different WordPress installs now. Works great.
Postmark is worth every penny and support is superb. I tried them all over the years.
One thing I hate about SendGrid is its lack of response to abuse reports. I keep reporting the same people sending spam emails, borderline phishing, and they never do anything about it. Gmail automatically filters them to spam folder, but you’d think SendGrid cares about reputation of their IPs. But they don’t. So unless you pay them for a dedicated IP, I wouldn’t use their shared IPs.
My novice-level 2 cents also go to Postmark. I like the ability to separate servers; logging has been a lifesaver, you can’t beat the price, and it is dead simple to implement. Their focus is transactional, and they do it well. We use SendGrid for other workloads, and I don’t feel delivery was as good.
You don’t need to limit yourself to providers with Gravity Forms add-on support. A generic email plugin for WordPress will handle emails from Gravity Forms as well, so you can consider Amazon SES using a plugin that supports SES such as WP Offload SES. Rock solid deliverability, super cheap. Logging is provided by the plugin. This approach also fixes other emails coming out of WordPress (e.g. auto-update notices, password change notices, other plugins like Wordfence / WooCommerce / etc.)
Taking a different angle on things, if your notification emails are all coming to you (i.e. nothing sent back to the entrant) then you could use the Help Scout add-on to drop notifications directly into Help Scout which will send you notification emails. Very different cost to a transactional email service, but very useful for managing the entire email conversation with the entrant.
Thanks for suggesting Help Scout. Never heard of it, but this will come in handy on another site we are assessing right now. We only need to notify one internal employee here. Thanks again.