

EMAIL - Easy setup (NOT SMTP)

Description: If you're having issues getting email to work as you'd like, whether SMTP or PHP sendmail, you may find this useful.

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[url=]Knowledge Base - EMAIL - Easy setup (NOT SMTP)[/url]

Should you use SMTP or not?

The simple answer is it's up to you but more and more hosting companies are unwilling to process emails via SMTP from sites that send a lot of emails such as bulletin boards. They seem to assume if a site sends a lot of emails, for whatever reason, that they're spam even if they aren't and, no matter what you do, sometimes your board emails may still be marked as spam at the receivers end. phpBB admins that use contact email addresses from free email services such as Google, Outlook, Zoho, Yahoo etc. can also run in to difficulties as these are often considered spam as well. Just because your SMTP service used to work doesn't mean that that will always be the case, hosts often roll out different settings which can affect emails without notice. Most hosts supply the 'correct' settings for their SMTP servers but in many cases even with the correct settings they won't work because of the above reasons. Bear in mind that in the main these issues are not because of phpBB, phpBB does not send email as such but uses whatever services are provided by the server.

If you're certain the settings your SMTP host supplies are 100% correct and it still doesn't work you should speak to the host about it.

An alternative to SMTP.

So, if your SMTP service has stopped working, you just can't get it to work or you would like to use the native PHP sendmail try this easy setup:
  1. Go to your hosting account and create an email address supplied by your domain like me@mydomain for example.
    • Don't use admin@mydomain, info@mydomain, noreply@mydomain or any of the more common ones you see, use yourname@mydomain or mydomain@mydomain etc, be inventive.
  2. Go to ACP> General> Client communication> Email settings.
  3. Make sure SMTP is turned off (Use SMTP server for email: Yes/No)
  4. Replace the existing email addresses in [Contact email address] and [From email address] with the new one you created from your domain.
  5. Click submit.
  6. Test your emails.
Note: If you've been using SMTP and want to revert just click 'yes' to re-enable SMTP as in (3) above.