Confused about Email setup in Cloudways/Vultr

#1

I just moved to Cloudways and planning migrating all my existing Wordpress installs that are now spread over several hosting companies.

One concern that I have is the mail setup for each of my sites. They have all 1 ore more mailboxes and Wordpress forms on their websites sending mail to their email boxes.

Now reading this forum it seems that there are several issuses regarding mail on wordpress forms and email setup in general.

Can someone help me out here and get me going?

Very much appreciated :wink:

#2

You are not going to have inboxes like traditional hosting/cpanel at cloudways. Your customer’s inboxes will need to be elsewhere, such as rackspace/zoho/googleapps.

For wordpress to send out emails/notifications/forms - you need to have outbound/transactional email SMTP setup. Cloudways has Elastic email that you can add to your server, or you can use your own service like like sendgrid/mailgun. There is a setting within your server dashboard that you can set this up so that in blankets all of your WP installations. Or, you can setup a SMTP plugin for each WP installation and configure it from there.

#3

@scamando Excellent answer!

Hi @Remco Except for Vultr and GCE, all default emails are sent without setting up any SMTP on server OR application. It is because the port 25 is blocked by the two providers.
If you set-up SMTP on a server. All the applications hosted on that server will use those SMTP credentials. To use separate credentials on different application installs, you need to set up SMTP on applications individually.
The above is for transactional emails.

And, if you want to receive emails. Then, you need to get an account for email hosting. Rackspace is considered as one of the best email hosting provider. We had a deal with Rackspace, you will get an email account for only $1/email/month instead of $2/email/month (their official pricing).

However, if you want to get a free email hosting. Then, Zoho mail can be the best option.

#4

I redirect all my domain emails to a gmail address. How could I set that up using Cloudways? Would I still need a Rackspace account per email?

#5

Hi @kmmsubs

Didn’t get you. Can you please explain it a bit more? Cloudways does not offer emails. With whom you are currently hosting your emails? :slight_smile:

#6

I’ve found a solution: from my domain registrar NameCheap I’ve set up a catch all forward to gmail. I have SendGrid for smtp so everything working well now.

#7

I have a couple of accounts at Rackspace that I point to via DNS MX. I use the same accounts for interactive/manual use (SMTP/IMAP) and for mail sent from my sites and services (SMTP). I use catch-all for some of the accounts. I don’t use any other service related to e-mail via Cloudways.

#8

Hello,

My wordpress websites send Email though Amazon SES, so after moving from Dreamhost to Cloudways, I won’t need to change anything to send emails ?

And on Dreamhost, messages received on my wordpress websites contact form are forwarded to my Gmail email, do I need to change anything to still receive messages on my Gmail ?

Thank you.

#9

My current set up is this:

  • Customers’ mailboxes (eg. sales@customer.com) are hosted at Zoho. Zoho allows up to 25 mailboxes with 5 GB each for every domain, for free. The catch is that you can’t use those mailboxes in Outlook or any other email client (ie, you won’t have IMAP/POP3/SMTP access), you’ll always need to use the webmail. If you need this and other features, you need to upgrade all your mailboxes at once. Their cheapest plan comes at $3 per month, which is cheaper than G-Suite. And if you pay annually, there’s a discount.

This is a great arrangement because web hosting gets separated from mail hosting, so I can freely move websites around if I need to, without affecting my customers’ email access.

  • SMTP sending from my servers (hosted at Vultr) is managed via Sendgrid. I have set it up using the SMTP options in Cloudways, so all my apps are sending their mails through my account there with no further configuration on each app. You can use any SMTP that’s available to you, just remember that some hosts like Vultr block port 25, so you’ll need to use an alternative port.

I actually tried Elastic Email (via a standalone account, not through their partnership with Cloudways) and liked it more than Sendgrid, but they attach a footer to all transactional emails and there’s no way to disable that. Customers started to complain so I had to go back to Sendgrid.

TLDR:

  • Clouways won’t provide inboxes to receive emails on your domain, you have to provide that yourself
  • You don’t need an inbox for the domain for an app to send e-mails (eg. contact forms)
  • You need to configure an SMTP service on your server so your apps can send emails (eg. contact forms). This can be set up on a server level (on the Cloudways panel) or on an app level (via app options or plugins)
#12

Hi,

As you are sending emails using Amazon SES and if you haven’t changed any emails records from your DNS registrar like MX and TXT records then there is no issue will come on your email service and it will work fine even after you moved to Cloudways hosting.

Further, if you get any issues related to same feel free to contact us.