12. Understanding Your Email Solutions

Transactional Email refers to the emails that every WordPress site sends regarding its administration and maintenance. Examples include WordPress updates, new user registrations and user comments.

Transactional Email Policies

In order to protect our members’ domain reputations, and to keep emails from their WPMU DEV hosted sites from winding up in spam inboxes, the From address on these transactional emails is [email protected]. All WPMU DEV sites are preconfigured to handle transactional emails in this way, and no configuration is required.

We do not allow sending non-transactional emails from [email protected]. These types of emails should be sent from an email address you own.

Note that this applies to all WPMU DEV hosted sites, including those where you have created one or more POP3 email accounts using your own domain. If you wish to change the From address on noreply emails to an address you own, use SMTP with any email server, even from one of your own Pro Email accounts. Our Branda plugin has an easy SMTP tool built right in for that. Learn how to configure SMTP sending in Branda here.

Transactional Email Limits

The number of transactional emails that can be sent per day and month for each WPMU DEV hosted site is limited, as shown below. These limits only apply if you are using our default [email protected] address. They do not apply if you’re using SMTP or an email address you own through a third-party mail service.

These sending limits are continuously monitored and, if your site exceeds these limits, we will notify you and temporarily block email sending until the daily or monthly average falls below the limit allowed on your plan.

Note that daily email limits are calculated based on the last 24-hour period, and the cumulative 30-day total cannot exceed the 30-day limit. For example, if you’re on the Bronze hosting plan, which has a limit of 150 emails, and you send 50 emails at 5am, another 50 at 10am, and another 50 at 3pm, you’ll have hit the 24-hour limit allowed by that plan. You’d have to wait until 5am the next day to be able to send another 50 emails, at which time you’d again hit the limit for the last 24 hours.

Still following along on our example of Bronze hosting, if you consistently send 150 emails for every 24-hour period, you’d hit the 30-day limit of 3000 within 20 days. You’d then need to wait a full 24 hours before being able to send a single email.

This explains why you might not be able to send emails, although the Email Stats under the Analytics tab of your site shows that you sent less than 150 emails (in our example, it is 50 emails) for that specific day.

If your site needs to regularly send more emails than our quota allows, please upgrade your plan or configure WordPress to use SMTP or another transactional email service like MailChannels.

You can view the number of emails your site has sent during the past 30 days under the Email Stats tab on your Hosting > Analytics screen.