Many website owners sometimes connect their Google Workspace, Office 365, or other personal or professional email accounts to their WordPress site for sending emails. It seems like a logical choice—after all, if you’re already paying for a reliable email service, why not use it for WordPress notifications, contact form submissions, and password reset emails?
The problem is that WordPress isn't just sending a few important emails here and there. Depending on your setup, your website might send hundreds or even thousands of emails in a short period of time. This can quickly cause problems with email deliverability, sender reputation, and even security.
How WordPress Email Behavior Can Hurt Your Email Deliverability
WordPress sends emails for various reasons: new user registrations, password resets requests and password change confirmations, order confirmations for eCommerce based sites, comment notifications, and plugin-generated or WordPress admin alerts. If your site gets attacked—such as through spam registrations or bot-driven password reset attempts—this can result in a flood of automated emails being sent from your domain.
When this happens, your email provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.) may see the sudden spike in activity as suspicious. This can lead to several problems:
- Emails going to spam – If WordPress sends too many emails too quickly, your email provider’s spam filters might assume you’re sending unwanted messages, even if they’re legitimate. This could cause your actual business emails to end up in customers’ or clients’ spam folders.
- Blocked or delayed emails – Email providers often impose sending limits. For example, Google Workspace has a daily sending limit of 500 for Google Workspace trial account is 500 emails per day and 2,000 emails for paid business accounts, but if WordPress unexpectedly sends a large batch of emails, you could hit that limit really fast. When this happens, your other emails—including critical business communications - may get delayed or blocked entirely. Gmail could even start blocking the connect attempts. They could even block your gmail profile which is probably connected to many services such as YouTube, Google Analytics, Search Console etc.
- Damage to your sender reputation – Email providers track the reputation of domains that send emails. If your WordPress site gets attacked and starts sending too many emails, your domain's reputation could suffer. A damaged sender reputation makes it more likely that all of your emails—whether sent from WordPress or your regular inbox—will be flagged as spam.
- IP blacklisting – If your site’s email activity is considered abusive (even if unintentionally), your sending IP address could end up on an email blacklist. This means that many email providers will refuse to deliver your messages at all, severely impacting your ability to communicate with customers, clients, or users.
- Server/Site shut down - some provider may even shut down the site or the server it's running on completely to avoid wasting resources and to block any activity so it doesn't affect their network and IP reputation.
What You Should Use Instead
Since using personal or business email services with WordPress can cause these issues, the better approach is to use an external email service provider (ESP) that is designed for transactional emails for WordPress site related emails. These services specialize in handling bulk emails and ensuring deliverability. Some of the most popular options include:
- Mailgun
- SendGrid
- Amazon SES
- Postmark
- SMTP.com
These providers have dedicated email-sending infrastructures that allow for better handling of email spikes and ensure that your emails actually reach inboxes. They also offer features like tracking, analytics, and bounce management, which are essential for maintaining good email deliverability.
Those external email service providers properly authenticate your emails using technologies like DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). Signing your WordPress emails with DKIM helps receiving mail servers verify that the emails are genuinely from your domain and haven’t been tampered with.
If you're using your own hosting for outgoing emails as well make sure you checkout this article as well: How to Sign WordPress Emails with DKIM on Your Hosting Server
Sending from your current hosting provider would ok if your WordPress site is a small to medium or even staging site that is not expected to send lots of emails.
How to Set Up an External Email Provider in WordPress
If you decide to use an external email provider, you’ll need to configure WordPress to send emails through that service. This is typically done using an SMTP plugin, which allows WordPress to route its emails through a dedicated email server instead of your web host or personal email provider.
Some popular SMTP plugins include:
- WP Mail SMTP
- Post SMTP
- Easy WP SMTP
After installing an SMTP plugin, you’ll need to enter the SMTP credentials provided by your external email service. This ensures that all outgoing emails from your WordPress site are properly authenticated and delivered through a reliable email-sending system.
While it may be tempting to use your existing Google Workspace, Office 365, or personal email provider for WordPress emails, doing so can lead to serious issues with deliverability, spam filtering, and even security. Instead, using a dedicated email-sending service or properly signing your WordPress emails with DKIM can help ensure that your messages reach their intended recipients.
Taking the time to set up email properly will save you from headaches down the line, ensuring that important notifications, customer communications, and business emails don’t get lost in spam folders or blocked entirely.
