WP Sent Mail

The best WordPress email logging plugin.

Documentation

WP Sent Mail adds a “Sent Mail” folder to WordPress that shows you exactly what emails your website sends to your customers.

Installation

Are you ready for this? It’s about to get really intense.  Try these steps on for size:

  1. Unzip downloaded zip file and upload wp-sent-mail folder to /wp-content/plugins/
  2. Go to Plugins and click “Activate” next to WP Sent Mail.

Configuration

The WP Sent Mail settings page is accessible by going to WP Sent Mail -> Settings.  It looks like this:

WPSent Mail Settings Page
WPSent Mail Settings Page

License Key

To receive support and updates, you’ll need to enter your license key (provided at purchase) and save your key settings.  This will reveal a button that will allow you to activate the current site.  The number of activations you receive depends on the license you purchased.

Enable Logging

This box turns on email logging and is checked by default.

Airplane Mode

Enabling this silently prevents emails from being sent, but logs the.  Great for dev sites!

Note: Airplane Mode can also be enabled by adding the following to your config file. This is especially helpful for local sites if you’re pulling a database frequently from production to your local site.

// WP Sent Mail - Airplane Mode
define( 'WPSM_AIRPLANE_MODE', true );

Track Opens

New in 2.1.0, emails that have been opened are colored green. You can also see the number of times an email has been opened!

Max Log Size

This is the maximum number of emails you’d like in your log at any given time.  This is handled by a cleanup cron job that runs twice a day.

Filters

Filters allow you to limit the emails that are logged, by providing criteria for certain fields. The filterable fields are:
to_address
to_name
content_type
from_address
from_name
subject
wp_user

You can provide more than one filter for a given field.  Values surrounded in asterisks (*) are treated as a wildcard.  Otherwise, the value is treated as an exact match.

Viewing Emails

You can view logged emails by going to WP Sent Mail -> WP Sent Mail.

View Logged Emails
View Logged Emails

This will reveal a table of all logged emails: (Remember, the green color means an email was opened! This only applies if you have the tracking pixel turned on in settings.)

WP Sent Mail - Email List
WP Sent Mail – Email List

You can also resend an email with one click:

WP Sent Mail - Resend from List View
WP Sent Mail – Resend from List View

Hovering over an item reveals a “View” link.

WP Sent Mail - View Email
WP Sent Mail – View Email

Which shows you the entire email, in all its HTML beauty:

WP Sent Mail - View Single Email
WP Sent Mail – View Single Email

We also recently added an admin dashboard widget that shows the latest 10 emails and gives you a quick link to the email list page.

WP Sent Mail - Admin Widget
WP Sent Mail – Admin Widget

Use Server UTC Time for Email

Occasionally we’ve had customers with issues related to the email sent date being incorrect. This appears to be related to the DB time being incorrect. As an alternative, you can set the following in your wp-config.php file to use the server’s UTC time instead of the DB time.

Before doing this, do double check that the universal/local time is displayed correctly beneath the timezone dropdown in the settings WP Admin > Settings > General > Timezone

// WP Sent Mail - Use server time instead of DB time for emails
define( 'WPSM_USE_SERVER_TIME', true );

Version History

Version 2.5.3 – 04/28/2022

  • Make using server time optional through constant WPSM_USE_SERVER_TIME
  • Bump tested with and version

Version 2.5.2 – 02/12/2022

  • Use server time for the timestamp

Version 2.5.1 – 02/07/2022

  • Fix an error in older PHP versions
  • Bump version

Version 2.5.0 – 02/02/2022

  • Update composer packages
  • Add support page
  • Only display admin dashboard widget if user is an admin
  • Overflow scroll on wide text only emails
  • Only show the airplane mode is active message on admin dashboard and WPSM pages
  • Attempt to handle attachments better
  • Update tested with to WP 5.9

Version 2.4.61 – 04/06/2021

  • Change approach to time zone calculations

Version 2.4.6 – 04/01/2021

  • Fix a bug with how offsets were handled differently than timezones

Version 2.4.5 – 02/18/2021

  • Fix a bug with timezones that are currently in daylight savings

Version 2.4.4 – 12/30/2020

  • Update tested with WP version to 5.6

Version 2.4.3 – 09/04/2020

  • Update tested with WP version to 5.5.1

Version 2.4.2 – 11/18/2019

  • Update tested with WP version to 5.3
  • Adds a column for number of times an email was opened to the list of emails

Version 2.4.1 – 09/17/2019

  • Fixes an error that shows up if the stars align.

Version 2.4.0 – 09/17/2019

  • Adds an admin widget with latest emails.
  • Switch to display time by settings in general site settings on single email view.

Version 2.3.7 – 09/13/2019

  • Switch to display time by settings in general site settings.

Version 2.3.6 – 08/26/2019

  • Fix issue with opened emails not getting proper css class on list view

Version 2.3.5 – 07/11/2019

  • Change icon for attachments column

Version 2.3.4 – 08/22/2019

  • Add support button.

Version 2.3.3 – 07/02/2019

  • Update the single email view to use a two column layout
  • Tested with WordPress 5.2.2
  • Add toggle to open/close raw output
  • Updates composer assets

Version 2.3.2 – 08/04/2017

  • Fix update issue.

Version 2.3.1 – 08/04/2017

  • Fix warning on log cleanup.
  • Fix bug with exclude filters that excluded all emails in some cases.

Version 2.3.0 – 05/17/2017

  • Support for BuddyPress!
  • CC and BCC handling!
  • Show default wordpress@domain.com from address when no from address is present.

Version 2.2.3 – 04/27/2017

  • Add time to date format string. Format using localized date format string.
  • Add link to settings from Airplane Mode notice.
  • Remove extra date header on single email view.

Version 2.2.2 – 04/26/2017

  • Add Airplane Mode compatibility with Postmark.

Version 2.2.1 – 04/19/2017

  • New site!
  • Re-factor Airplane mode. Now detects conflicts and also works with Mailgun properly.
  • Switch dependencies to composer.
  • Handle licensing better.

Version 2.1.3 – 02/17/2017

  • Update updater URL.

Version 2.1.2 – 01/11/2016

  • Fixed compatibility issue with WordPress 4.4.x+

Version 2.1.1 – 11/24/2014

  • Update updater to fix updates.

Version 2.1.0 – 11/23/2014

  • Improved activation code for updates.
  • Added open tracking!
  • Added airplane mode!

Version 2.0.0 – 10/30/2014

  • Added email resend! You can now resend your emails with a single click, right from the email log!
  • Improved support for plain text emails.
  • Re-engineered logging to improve performance and compatibility with other plugins.
  • Added support for wpMandrill.

Version 1.1.0 – 06/10/2014

  • Includes support for email attachments. If file is on server, provides link. Otherwise, provides file name.
  • Default sort is now descending.
  • Overhauls licensing code.

Version 1.0 – 02/07/2014

  • Initial release.

Support

If you have problems, the preferred way to get support is to contact us through the support page.