WP Mail SMTP Settings

Our web servers do not offer PHP mail / sendmail based sending of mail.  Anti-spam filters also rank mail sent using those methods as more spammy.  As such, for wordpress it is needed to use a plugin to send mail out from wordpress .   We recommend  FluentSMTP or WP Mail SMTP plugin for SMTP sending and below are the recommended settings for our hosting.  The same settings you use for sending mail with a standard mail client (outlook, thunderbird, etc) would also apply here. 

• Mailer: Other SMTP
• SMTP Host: mail.example.host
  • replace mail.example.host with the real SMTP server -- generally this will be the same server you use for mail clients.  It will not likely be mail.example.com where example.com is your domain, however, it may work with the caveat of not matching the SMTP server's certificate name.
• Encryption: SSL
• SMTP Port: 465
• Auth TLS: Yes
• Authentication: Yes
• SMTP User: user@example.com
  • we recommend to use a dedicated mailbox for this purpose
• SMTP Password: the password for the mailbox

Another option to using SMTP is using a "transactional mail gateway" that uses an API that can be connected over standard https protocols.  Sendgrid and mailgun would be examples of these types of services.  When using such a service, it is required to update DNS records to allow those mail services to send mail for your domain.