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First don’t trust the default email settings after a fresh WordPress install. If nothing is configured WordPress will rely on the underlying host/server, and that is something that you don’t have impact on.

I always use the WordPress plugin: “Post SMTP Setup”. It allows you to easily configure your mail delivery system (can be anything: Office 365, Amazon ses, … ).
A big advantage is that it keeps a log of the last X emails send out by WordPress.

In this example I use the email system service of versio.nl.

I created an email: e.g. [email protected] and a password (in DirectAdmin)

These are the plugin systems:


SMTPS to mail.axc.nl:465 together with the created email and password.

Next try to do a “Send Test Email”.
You should see something like this

Your message was delivered (455 ms) to the SMTP server! Congratulations 🙂

Got a message similar to this ?

5.7.0 mailserver not pointing to our network

In my case I resolved it by fixing something in Cloudflare.
Cloudflare can mask the IP addresses associated with dns records. Which is a good thing but in my case the email service (versio.nl) required to have it published. So the MX record must me associated with a public IP, instead of a logical name.

TIP: Make sure to check the deliverability of your email by using a service like e.g. https://www.mail-tester.com/ It will give you feedback on what to optimise.
Because I got a bad score, I wanted to try another famous email service as well: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Amazon SES

Verify a New Domain

Next add several DNS records

1 txt record, three cname records and optionally one MX record (only if you also want to receive email through Amazon).

This can take a while before Amazon has ‘verified’ the changes.
Tip: refresh the page after a couple minutes

Create SMTP credentials:
amazon AWS SES console; click ‘Create My SMTP credentials’. Download the username and password as we will need them.

Got a couple of error at first:
“Must issue a STARTTLS command first”
“Could not open socket”

After a couple attempts, these are the correct settings:

Or when using MailPoet

Mail testers online:
https://litmus.com/gmail-tabs
https://www.mail-tester.com/

It seems I could get some extra points for “You’re not fully authenticated” 😉

So I added a TXT dns record with record to your domain: _dmarc.masteryourtodolist.be with the following value: “v=DMARC1; p=none”