We did the wrong by supporting Mandrill. Mandrill, SendGrid – all are Cloud Transactional Email Services. We had easy guide to integrate Mandrill with WordPress to receive email from contact us form, integrating Mandrill with XenForo. SendGrid is Known Cloud Transactional Email Service With Free Quota. Here is an Easy WordPress Mandrill Alternative SendGrid Transition Guide. Mandrill suddenly fully closed their free Quota of usage. SendGrid is definite choice after Mandrill has closed, we mean no free service. Most of us use a paid email service like Google Apps for domain named emails. But a Transactional Email Service is better to have. This guide is for new WordPress users. SendGrid has many advanced functions, we will write the easy steps for only somehow making the contact us form working. SendGrid may be complicated to a new user.
WordPress Mandrill Alternative SendGrid Transition Guide
If you are using our old method to integrate Mandrill with WordPress or any such snippet or plugin – remove them.
Register for SendGrid. We use DynDNS as DNS service. Whatever DNS service you use, open it. On SendGrid’s control panel, click Setting link. Here is the needed guide by SendGrid to add the subdomains in your DNS service :
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1 | https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/Settings/Whitelabel/index.html |
They have billions of documents. You can read later. This is minimum to add those 5 CNAMES for whitelisting. Now, from WordPress Admin panel install the official SendGrid Plugin. After installation and activating, user Username & Password method in WordPress SendGrid Plugin settings to validate and activate. Send email from your contact us form to test. All is set.
WordPress Mandrill Alternative SendGrid Transition Guide : Advanced
We need to set the DMARC, SPF, DKIM etc. Why DMARC, DKIM etc needed was discussed before in a previously published article.
If you are already using Google Apps like main mail service, possibly DMARC already set, for example it is ours :
1 | "v=DMARC1\; p=none\; pct=100\; rua=mailto:webmaster@thecustomizewindows.com\; ruf=mailto:admin@thecustomizewindows.com\;" |
there is nothing new for adding SendGrid service. Do not remove the existing Mandrill DKIM now in DNS record :
1 | _domainkey.thecustomizewindows.com" 5 min TXT v=DKIM1\; k=rsa\; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSI vWob2OaKynO8/lQIDAQAB\;" |
You old sent mail may get flagged as spams to the users by the client softwares! Remove after a significant time. SendGrid’s SPF is easy, this is for Mandrill + Google Apps + SendGrid :
1 | "v=spf1 include:spf.mandrillapp.com include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net ~all" |
That is explained here :
1 2 | https://support.sendgrid.com/hc/en-us/articles/202517236-SPF-Records-Explained https://sendgrid.com/blog/how-to-authenticate-your-email-in-5-steps/ |
This is a real header received from SendGrid using our contact us form. We need simple easy bridging for contact us form. Expecting too many features from a free, non-primary email service account is not needed.
