In this video you'll set up a transactional email sending system within your live WordPress web site
using send grid.
There are two major advantages to using a service like send a grid instead of Google's Gmail servers
like we learned in the last video.
For one you're able to send email from the Web site's actual domain name instead of the gmail address.
Secondly dedicated email delivery companies like send grid allow more e-mail volume and are true experts
at managing email deliverability.
By the end of this lesson you'll set up the most professional and secure transactional email system
possible for a WordPress Web site.
First of all let's go into our WordPress dashboard and take a look at the ad plug ins page and just
search for send grid and you can see that said grid has its own WordPress plugin that's designed to
work inside of your Wordpress installation.
So to set up sended the first thing you'll have to do is look at your installed plug ins list and just
deactivate the postman s m t p plug it in.
By clicking de-activate this will reset WordPress to be sending by the traditional method again and
when you install the send grid plug in and activate it they won't conflict with each other.
Now I should tell you that I was successfully able to use the postman S-M T.P. plug in to set up a send
grid.
If you notice inside of the postman plug in page if you look at the description it's designed for G-mail
and others including Sun Grid.
It was a very easy set up.
I just had to put my API credentials from center grid inside of the postman plug in settings and it
worked perfectly.
But since postman is made by a third party and if I wanted to keep using send grid into the future I
think it's a better idea to use the supported send grid plug in instead and that way when send grid
makes an update to their API or anything like that you'll be able to have send grid's plug in update
itself when needed.
So if I just show you very quickly if I activate the postman S-M T.P. plug in at the same time that
send grid is activated.
You can see that send good gives me an error message here.
WP mail is the default mail sending system that's instead of Wordpress and it says that since WP mail
has been declared by another plug in and that's the postman.
As empty people again you won't be able to use cent..
Right now I already have 7 grids set up inside Gray Davis dot com and I'm going to show you how to set
it up by looking inside of my settings and inside of the send grid website.
So for now I'll just go back down to the postman S-M T.P. settings page and I'll show you that I had
actually gone and used this import export reset plugin setting.
So when I clicked that I went down here and I was able to reset the plug in.
This doesn't have any settings anymore because I've already reset it.
But usually this button will appear red and you can just get rid of all of the S-M T.P. settings that
you set up before using Gmail.
So since this is having a plugin conflict and show me these this error I'm just going to go back to
the installed plugins page inside my wordpress dashboard and I'm just going to deactivate postman as
MCP great now you can see that I do have this grid plug in activated and if I go to the settings page
it's just a single page and it has two authentication methods.
And I found that the API key that I got from my second grade account was easy to set up.
I just placed that code inside of here and chose API here.
Now one thing to note if you do use user name and password instead of API then you have to use this
external swift plug in to send via S.M. t.p.
So I think it's easiest to set it using the API key and it's also the most secure.
So I can choose my e-mail that I set up send grid with to use as the sending address and then I can
choose a content type where I want just plain text or text along with HDMI.
And that was it I clicked update settings and it was ready to go and I was able to go down here and
sent a test email.
So let's go through that process together.
Go ahead and go to send grid dot com.
And this is their home page.
You can see that even at cent. They do both kinds of e-mail transactional e-mail and marketing e-mail
and they differentiate the two.
In fact when you're using their service for transactional e-mail it's a different side of their business
that they use to do marketing e-mails or what you might call bulk e-mails.
So first thing you want to do is to go and click sign up if you don't have an account already.
Basically you enter an e-mail address and any other information they need and you click the sign up
button and you have to go back and check your e-mail.
And then they will go ahead and confirm your e-mail address.
You can use this try for free button right here.
And after you've confirmed your e-mail address you can log into send grid and then set up your free
account you can pause a video now and go ahead and sign up for send grid.
Now since I've already signed up for send good I'm going to go back to their home page and click the
loggin button at the top right and I'll just use the username and password that I had set up when I
signed up for sended and it opens up my send dashboard one of the great things about using sand grid
is it has all of these great e-mail analytics when the dashboard is set up.
It tells you your your different e-mails that have been sent in your recent activity could see that
actually I sent two e-mails today after setting this up as a demo for this video inside of my account.
Well once you're inside of your central dashboard there are some important things to set up to get your
AP.
I key that you need to put into your wordpress site down on the left hand side if you just click Settings
you can see that there's an API keys button.
Now I already have an API key that I set up with a name of postman API.
Greg Davis.
Now I use that same API key after getting it to work with postman.
I turned off the postman plug in and installed the send good plug in and I was able to use that same
API key.
Now it's important to note that this is an API key ID and this is not my actual API key when they give
you an API key.
They have a warning on the page that says that you better copy and paste and save this API key in a
safe location.
I saved it into a document on my computer and remembered where it was so that I could retrieve it later.
If I go to the settings here I could edit the details of this API key and this is something that you'll
go through when you say create a new API key.
What I did was I named the key and then I basically gave send grid through this key full access to all
of the options so I clicked full access when I could and I create and I clicked read access and all
of the other places.
So I'm getting myself full access through this API key for the send grid service to work through my
web site so I'll just cancel that since I've already used this blue button at the top right to create
my API key.
Well I do have that API key and so there is if you look in the documentation at send grid you'll see
that they recommend using the officials send grid WordPress plug in.
If you click that it just takes you to WordPress dot org where you can look at the send grid plug in
page back inside of the Wordpress dashboard.
You know I just went to plug ins and knew I searched for censored and I was able to install this plug
in on its own.
So once you've copied the API key go back into the settings send grid and this is the send grid plug
in settings and choose API key.
Paste your entire API key into that field set.
Click sendmail with API.
If it's not selected already and you just have to select a name and then the email address from which
you'd like to send mail and you can choose a couple of other optional fields if you like.
I choose text slash HTL which would enable me to send H.T. e-mail based e-mails if I have that enabled
inside of Wordpress or directly from cent. Then I click the update settings and that was it send grid
was set up.
So once you send a test mail you could send this potentially to the same address that you used at the
top and that would work as a test.
And I sent it to a different e-mail address that I have at my domain name and I just made a little test
and click send and it gave me a message that that e-mail had sent correctly.
And now if I go back to my e-mail account you can see that I've got an e-mail open.
That was my subject line testing from center grid and I wrote Hi this is a test.
So the e-mail came through correctly it came from the address I had placed in the field inside that
plug in.
And like we did before.
Let's take a look at the source of this e-mail.
Now you're looking at all the headers up here.
And if you scroll down and just look at the authentication results which is important stuff you can
see that the SPF has passed and that's the sender policy framework.
And you know if you scroll to the right just a little bit on that line there's a little bit extra.
There is a scroll across just a little bit further and you can also see that there's a secondary type
of e-mail authentication called DKIM and that also passed if you do a little bit of research you'll
see that there's three kinds of e-mail authentication.
One is SPF and that's the first and most simple.
And the second one is called DKIM and sender it has that automatically set up through their servers
and there is a third type of authentication that actually failed here.
But it's no big deal because I have the first two using at least an SPF record is the best idea if you
can get the other two.
All the better to set up D-mark.
You have to set up another series of DNS records inside of your domain name so that recognizes that
email sent from the Greg Davis dot com domain name is also authenticated.
I'm not worried about that very much right now but you can see that this has been sent through the send
grid servers close that you can see that I also have a tab open here where it's my post.
S.M. T-P test that I sent through the send grid's servers.
Earlier I mentioned that I successfully set up send a grid through the postman plug in as well.
This is just what their sample e-mail looks like when you send it to yourself.
And if I look at a view source again I have authentication results.
SPF equals pass as well as you can see that it's coming from the send grid dot net servers.
Several places here in the header and I also have those same results in terms of authentication.
Let me find that again.
There's the DKA I am signatures.
Here we go.
If I find the authentication results I can see that I have the SPF equals pass and then over here a
little bit further there it is.
There's my DKIM is has passed as well and I don't have D-Mark set for my domain name yet in my DNS records
at the domain or the server level.
And so that's OK.
But again that was successfully set up through the post-event S M T-P plug in which is referenced right
here inside the header now if you followed along closely so far and pause the video and set up your
own life site checking your emails being sent through the send good service your rate caught up to me
here.
Now if you are using flywheel to set up your life sites guess what.
You didn't have to do anything at all.
Again as I indicated in a previous video flywheel uses send good to send e-mails and they're already
set up to do that through the Wordpress service.
So you don't need to install the plug in or any other third party service except just let WordPress
do its job because flywheel has already upgraded your wordpress site to send through Send good.
One last quick piece of info I looked up inside the documentation of Sen grid about the D-mark authentication
and you can read a little bit about it here.
It does say that before you can set up D-Mark authentication you do have to have the two previous methods.
SPF and DKIM which stands for domain keys identify file mail and SPF and DKIM must be implemented before
a D-Mark policy can be put into place.
They also have an implementing D-Mark link right here in this little description and that opens up some
instructions about setting it up and this would be the most secure email sending system that you could
set up.
You do have to have access to your domain name and do a few pretty complicated things.
One important thing to note is that D-Mark is a powerful way to help prevent malicious entities it says
but D-Mark isn't for everyone.
If you own a small domain you're probably OK without it.
They say right here if you've ever had problems with phishing in the past or have a business that's
financially oriented it might be right for you.
They said in the previous page that the SPF framework and the DK I am would have to fail before D-Mark
is even looked at.
In this lesson you set up a more secure and robust email sending system for transactional email sent
through your Wordpress Web site.
You can see that the additional layer of DKIM authentication is used as well as the first layer called
SPF or sender policy framework.
Standard also gives the website the ability to send more emails per day and per month than the Google
Gmail system we set up in the last video in the next video we quickly set up another email service called
Sparke post like standard.
They have their own supported WordPress plugin and it's a similar setup to send good but the spark post-service
has a free level that allows for up to 100000 emails per month.
Let's set it up