Set up transactional email for WordPress using xCloud by selecting a mail provider, adding four DNS records in Cloudflare, and verifying with the pre-installed FluentSMTP plugin. The tutorial walks through connecting cybernate360.com, sending a test email, and confirming delivery success.
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WordPress wants to send emails for a variety of reasons. It might be a password reset or a comment notification or any number of things. Now WordPress itself can't send email. It always hands off that, that job to a mail server. Now sometimes that mail server is on the same machine as the web server, but sometimes it's not. It's not always good to have a mail server on the same machine as your web server. Both for security and resource usage reasons. And xCloud is a host that does not keep them together. They separate those concerns, which is good. And I'm going to show you how to do that because it's both easy and very flexible. Now, the first thing you have to do is set up, uh, who's going to handle your email. So I'm going to go to Settings and then Integrations and then Mail Provider. Now, your account with xCloud comes with 100 free emails per month. Now, if you need more than that or a different, uh, sending server or something like that, you can choose Add New Provider. Now, if you choose xCloud you can buy more emails for about $1 a month per 1,000, and that's very flexible. However, if you already have a service for sending email like SendGrid or Mailgun or some other, then you can use those. Now I'm going to go ahead and sign up for the 1,000 emails, and you'll see why in a few minutes. There. Now I have, uh, this xCloud 1000. So now I need to connect this to the site that I'm going to use it on. So we're going to do Topher's site, and it uses the cybernate360.com domain name, and that's at Cloudflare for DNS. So on the left here, we're going to go to email config and Mail Delivery. And here we choose our provider. Now I went first to the integrations and set one up. If I hadn't, you could click right here to do that. Um, so I'm going to choose, uh, we're going to choose this one first. And when you use the free ones, the from address cannot use your own domain name. They they offer you one. So it's topher@xcloud.email, um, which if you're just getting password resets, that's totally fine. But if you need it better branded, then you can switch to one of the paid ones. And here you have the choice of using the xCloud domain or your own domain. Now if you're going to use your own domain, then you need to set up some DNS records. So let's come up here and I'm gonna copy that because if I don't copy it, I will spell it wrong. Put that right in here and you can see how this populates. So now I need to copy 4 records, 3 text and 1 CNAME, to my DNS setup, which right now is in Cloudflare. So, uh, the text for this one is, uh, the name cybernate360.com and this value. So I'm going to hit copy, and now we're going to go to Cloudflare. So I'm going to click domains and click this one, and on the left, DNS, and then records. Right now I only have one record, and it's the A record, and that's for the website. So we're going to click Add Record, and the type is text, and the name is— oh, I'm going to put that in a second, uh, but that's the value. Um, you know what, actually we're not, we're going to use There we go. And then, uh, you can put a comment in here if you wish. So hit save. There, now we have that TXT record. So now let's do the next one. So this is a CNAME and the name is tracking, and this is what goes in there. So we're gonna add record. Choose CNAME, type tracking, make sure I spell it right, and put that in and hit save. Okay, so next we put in another TXT, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna copy that. I'm not gonna try to remember it. This is also a TXT record. And the name is this, and the value is this, and we'd save. And I'm going to do the last one and copy that. This is also a text record. And we copy this, make that the content, save. In this video, I'm using Cloudflare SSL, and that's why I've enabled the Cloudflare proxies on the DNS records. If you are not using Cloudflare SSL method or any other SSL method, then you need to turn off the proxies. There we are. So now we have our DNS records set up and we can click Verify Record to make sure we did it right. And we did. So now I click Save Changes. Now typically when you're setting up external, uh, mail servers for WordPress, you have to set up an SMTP plugin. Fortunately, xCloud does that for us. They use FluentSMTP and they installed it and configured it. So let's go to that. I'm going to use magic login and under settings we see FluentSMTP and it's all configured. And a cool thing about FluentSMTP is that it shows stats of sending and things like that. So there's my provider, uh, email test, etc. It has to be from the domain that this is configured for. There we are. So now let's take a look at WordPress. Magic login. And under settings, we find Fluent SMTP, and it's all configured. Uh, one of the cool things about having an SMTP plugin is that it keeps track of emails that it sends and their success rate and that sort of thing. If we go to settings, you can see what the from is going to be. Uh, it keeps log files. There's my default connection, etc. And if you want to test, you can just go to email test and set the from and the to, and send test email. So there you are, that's how you set up email in xCloud.
