Luxa SMTP — User Guide

Luxa SMTP replaces WordPress’s default wp_mail() function with a real, authenticated SMTP connection. Once configured, every email your site sends — password resets, WooCommerce order emails, contact form replies, anything using wp_mail() — goes out through your SMTP provider instead of your host’s often-unreliable default mail function.

The plugin adds one top-level menu item, Luxa SMTP, to your wp-admin sidebar, with four screens: Settings, Test Email, Email Log, and Add-ons.

This is where you connect Luxa SMTP to your email provider.

1. Go to Luxa SMTP → Settings.
2. Check Enable to turn on SMTP sending. Leave it unchecked and the plugin does nothing — WordPress keeps using its own default mail function, so you can configure everything first and enable it only once you’re ready.
3. Choose a Mailer Provider preset — Gmail, Outlook/365, Yahoo, SendGrid, Mailgun, or Amazon SES. Picking one auto-fills the Host, Port, and Encryption fields for you. If your provider isn’t listed, choose Custom SMTP and fill those three fields in yourself (your provider’s documentation will have these values).
4. Fill in Username and Password — the credentials your SMTP provider gave you. The password is encrypted before it’s saved (see the FAQ for details) and is never shown again in plain text; leaving the password field blank on a later save keeps whatever was already stored, so you don’t need to re-enter it every time you change another setting.
5. Optionally set From Email and From Name to control what recipients see as the sender, regardless of what an individual plugin (WooCommerce, a form plugin, etc.) tries to set.
6. Click Save Changes.

Gmail specifically

Gmail will not accept your normal account password here — you need an App Password:

1. Enable 2-Step Verification on the Gmail account you’re using to send.
2. Create an App Password.
3. Use that generated password in the Password field, not your regular Gmail password.

The Settings page shows this same reminder automatically whenever the Gmail preset is selected.

A separate, technical log for troubleshooting the plugin itself (not your email history — that’s the Email Log, covered below). It’s capability-gated and off unless you turn it on:

• Add ?lxs_debug=1 to any wp-admin URL while logged in as an administrator, or
• Have WP_DEBUG enabled in wp-config.php.

Entries appear on the Debug Log tab (capped at the most recent 200); a Clear Log button is available once there’s anything to clear.

Use this page to confirm your SMTP configuration actually works before relying on it for real traffic.

1. Go to Luxa SMTP → Test Email.
2. Adjust the Send to, Subject, and Message fields if you want (they’re pre-filled with sensible defaults).
3. Click Send Test Email.
4. If it fails, a Debug Log panel appears right there on the page showing the raw SMTP conversation — this is usually enough to spot a wrong port, the wrong encryption setting, or a rejected password.

The Current Settings table below the button is a quick read-only summary of what’s currently configured, useful when double-checking before you troubleshoot further.

Every email the plugin sends is recorded here — success or failure, free of charge, not a paid upsell.

• Filter by All / Success / Failed using the links above the table.
• Each row shows the time, recipient, subject, status, and (for failures) the error message.
• Clear All wipes the entire log immediately (this cannot be undone).
• Old entries purge themselves automatically based on the retention period you set on the Settings page (Automatically delete log entries older than (days) — set to 0 to keep everything forever).

If you have Pro add-ons enabled, this same page also gains an Actions column and extra buttons — see the Pro sections below.

Luxa SMTP → Add-ons lists every Pro add-on. Without a Pro license, each shows a Learn more link. With Pro installed and licensed:

• Each add-on shows a small on/off toggle switch — this is completely separate from your license. Your license controls whether you’re entitled to use Pro add-ons at all; the toggle controls whether a specific one is currently running on this site. Turning Backup Connection off, for example, doesn’t touch Failure Alerts or your license in any way, and all your settings for a toggled-off add-on are kept — turn it back on later and everything is exactly as you left it.

Automatically retries through a second SMTP server when your primary connection fails to send.

Setup — Settings → Backup Connection tab:

1. Check Enable backup connection.
2. Fill in a different provider’s Host/Port/Encryption/Username/Password than your primary connection (e.g. primary = Gmail, backup = SendGrid) — using the same provider for both defeats the purpose, since whatever took down the primary connection will likely affect the backup too.
3. Save.

When the primary connection fails, Luxa SMTP automatically retries through the backup — silently, in the background. You’ll see a second row in the Email Log noting the result of the retry (“Sent successfully via backup connection.” or “The backup connection also failed.”).

Notifies you the moment an email fails to send, so you find out from the plugin instead of from a customer complaint.

Setup — Settings → Failure Alerts tab:

1. Check Enable failure alerts.
2. Turn on one or both channels:
   • Email — sent to the address you enter, or your site’s admin email if you leave it blank.
   • Webhook — pick a Format (Slack, Discord, or Generic JSON) and paste the webhook URL your Slack/Discord/other tool gave you.
3. Set Minimum minutes between alerts (the cooldown). If several emails fail in a short window, you get one alert per cooldown period — the next alert after a quiet spell tells you how many additional failures happened in between, so nothing silently goes unmentioned even though you’re not flooded with one alert per failure.

Resend an email straight from the Email Log — a single one, or in bulk.

Before this works, turn the add-on on from the Add-ons page. Unlike the other add-ons, this one has a real data cost: it starts saving the full email body and attachment file paths so there’s something to resend later. It’s off by default for exactly that reason.

• Single resend — click Resend next to any row in the Email Log. If a row shows “Resend unavailable” instead, that email was logged before you turned the add-on on, so nothing was saved for it.
• Bulk resend — buttons above the table adapt to whichever filter you’re viewing: Resend All Failed (Failed view), Resend All Successful (Success view — recipients get a duplicate, so this asks for confirmation), or Resend All (All view — resends everything, strongest confirmation of the three).
• Attachments are stored as file paths, not copies of the files themselves. If the original file (often a temporary one) no longer exists by the time you resend, the email still goes out — just without that attachment.

Export the Email Log to a file.

Also off by default — turn it on from the Add-ons page.

Two buttons, Export CSV and Export XLSX, appear above the table and respect whichever All/Success/Failed filter you currently have selected. Exports are capped at 10,000 rows in one go, to keep a single export from timing out on a very busy site’s log.

A weekly email summarizing your send activity: how many emails sent successfully, how many failed, and a short list of the most recent failures.

Setup — Settings → Weekly Report tab:

1. Check Enable weekly report.
2. Set Send to (blank = your site’s admin email).
3. Pick Send on — any day of the week. The report always covers the 7 days leading up to whenever it actually sends, regardless of which day you pick.

By default, uninstalling either plugin keeps your data — settings and email history are left in place in case you reinstall later. If you want a clean removal instead, check Delete data on uninstall under Settings → SMTP Configuration before you delete the plugin.