SMTP Manager – Email Logs, Monitoring & Alerts

Is your WordPress site silently failing to send emails? Order confirmations, password resets, contact form notifications, shipping updates — when they don’t land in the inbox, you’re usually the last person to find out, often from an angry customer. SMTP Manager – Email Logs, Monitoring & Alerts is the WordPress SMTP plugin that fixes email deliverability at the source, logs every single send, and alerts your team the instant delivery breaks again — on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Discord, completely free.

Most WordPress SMTP plugins stop the moment your email starts sending again. This one keeps going: continuous SMTP health monitoring, a fully searchable email log with CSV export, scheduled delivery reports, and real-time failure alerts that many competing SMTP plugins lock behind a paid upgrade.

Why your WordPress emails are failing

By default, WordPress sends email through your server’s PHP mail() function. PHP mail has no authentication — no SPF, no DKIM, nothing that proves to Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo that the message is legitimate. Most inbox providers either bin it as spam or drop it outright. That’s why “WordPress not sending email” is one of the most common WordPress problems there is, and why every serious site needs proper SMTP — authenticated, encrypted mail delivery through a real mail server or transactional email provider.

How SMTP Manager fixes it

The plugin reconfigures wp_mail() to send through the authenticated SMTP server you configure — your hosting provider, Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any transactional email service (SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Brevo, Zoho, SMTP.com, and others all work over standard SMTP). Every email is logged with its delivery status, and an automated health check keeps testing your connection in the background — so instead of finding out about a broken mail server from an angry customer, you find out from a Slack message.

✅ Core features

• Universal SMTP connection — host, port, and encryption (SSL / TLS / none) for any standard SMTP provider, with auto-TLS upgrade support
• Built-in quick-reference for popular providers — Gmail / Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 / Outlook, Yahoo Mail, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Mailgun host/port/encryption settings, right inside the settings page
• Full email log — date, subject, sender, recipient, delivery status, and the actual error message for every email wp_mail() sends
• AJAX-driven search and filtering — live search-as-you-type plus date-range presets (today through all time), no page reloads
• CSV export of the filtered log for record-keeping or support tickets
• One-click “Send Test Email” to verify your configuration instantly, with failure-type classification (authentication failure, SMTP rejection, or plugin/system error) so you know exactly what’s wrong
• Scheduled HTML delivery reports — daily, weekly, or monthly summary emails with a visual chart of sent/failed/unconfirmed volume
• Automatic log retention — keep the last 30 days or the last 1,000 records, pruned automatically
• WordPress Dashboard widget — SMTP health and 30-day send volume at a glance, without opening the plugin’s settings page
• Encrypted password storage — your SMTP password is encrypted at rest, not stored as plaintext
• Dark-mode admin UI built for clarity, not just decoration

🔔 Real-time failure alerts — completely free

This is the feature most SMTP plugins put behind a premium plan. Here, it’s free:

• Automated SMTP health checks via WordPress Cron — a real connection + EHLO + STARTTLS + AUTH test on the interval you choose, with no test email sent on success
• Five alert channels: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord, and a Custom Webhook option that POSTs a structured JSON payload (event, site_name, error_msg, consecutive_failures, and more) for Zapier, Make, n8n, or your own endpoint
• Configurable failure threshold — alert after 1 failure or wait for N consecutive failures, your choice
• Notification cap so a prolonged outage doesn’t spam your channel forever
• External provider status check — when an alert fires, the plugin checks whether the failure looks like an outage on your provider’s end before notifying you
• All webhook URLs are validated against the provider’s real domain and sent over wp_safe_remote_post(), so a misconfigured webhook can’t be used to reach internal network addresses

🔌 Works with everything that uses wp_mail()

WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, user registration/password reset emails, and literally any other plugin or theme that sends mail through WordPress’s standard wp_mail() function — because that’s exactly what this plugin hooks into. Nothing to reconfigure on the form/store plugin side.

🌐 Supported SMTP providers

Anything that speaks standard SMTP with host/port/username/password authentication works, because the plugin talks SMTP directly rather than locking you into a specific provider’s proprietary API:

• Gmail / Google Workspace (App Passwords, or Workspace SMTP relay for higher volume)
• Microsoft 365 / Outlook
• SendGrid
• Mailgun
• Amazon SES
• Brevo
• Zoho Mail
• Yahoo Mail, SMTP.com, or your own hosting provider’s mail server

🆚 How this is different

Most SMTP plugins solve half the problem: they get your email sending again, and stop there. If the connection breaks again next month — expired app password, host changed something, provider outage — you won’t know until someone tells you. Many plugins in this category also reserve email alerting (Slack, Teams, Discord notifications) for their paid tier. SMTP Manager – Email Logs, Monitoring & Alerts treats failure alerting as core functionality, not an upsell, because a delivery plugin that can’t tell you when delivery breaks isn’t finished doing its job.

Documentation & support

Full plugin details: bytecorestack.com/plugins/smtp-manager. For SMTP protocol background, see the WordPress wp_mail() developer reference.

External Services

This plugin may contact the following external services. All connections are either user-initiated or require explicit configuration by the site administrator.

1. Your SMTP server (user-configured) The plugin routes all WordPress emails through the SMTP server credentials you enter in Settings → SMTP Manager. The hostname, port, username, and password are provided entirely by you. No data is sent to any ByteCore Stack server.

2. Slack Incoming Webhooks (optional) If you enable Slack alerts, the plugin will POST a JSON failure notification to the Slack Incoming Webhook URL you provide when consecutive SMTP failures are detected. This URL is specific to your Slack workspace and is created by you. * Service: Slack Technologies, LLC * Privacy policy: https://slack.com/privacy-policy * Terms of service: https://slack.com/terms-of-service

3. Microsoft Teams Incoming Webhooks (optional) If you enable Teams alerts, the plugin will POST a JSON failure notification to the Teams Incoming Webhook URL you provide when consecutive SMTP failures are detected. This URL is specific to your Teams channel and is created by you. * Service: Microsoft Corporation * Privacy policy: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement * Terms of service: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement

4. Google Chat Incoming Webhooks (optional) If you enable Google Chat alerts, the plugin will POST a JSON failure notification to the Google Chat Incoming Webhook URL you provide when consecutive SMTP failures are detected. This URL is specific to your Chat space and is created by you. * Service: Google LLC * Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy * Terms of service: https://policies.google.com/terms

5. Discord Incoming Webhooks (optional) If you enable Discord alerts, the plugin will POST a JSON failure notification to the Discord Incoming Webhook URL you provide when consecutive SMTP failures are detected. This URL is specific to your Discord channel and is created by you. * Service: Discord Inc. * Privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy * Terms of service: https://discord.com/terms

6. Custom Webhook (optional) If you enable the Custom Webhook channel, the plugin will POST a structured JSON failure notification to the URL you provide when consecutive SMTP failures are detected. This URL is entirely user-supplied — point it at Zapier, Make, n8n, or your own server. No data is sent unless you configure this channel.

7. Google Fonts API The admin settings page loads two typefaces (DM Sans and DM Mono) from the Google Fonts API to render the admin UI. This request is made only by the administrator’s browser when visiting the plugin settings page. No personal data from site visitors is ever transmitted. * Service: Google LLC * Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy * Terms of service: https://policies.google.com/terms * Font API endpoint: https://fonts.googleapis.com/

No data is collected, transmitted to, or processed by ByteCore Stack servers.