What Your Website Can Send
Email and web hosting are two different jobs that old hosting packages happened to sell together. Oxyforge does the web hosting. Your website can still send the small amount of mail WordPress needs to function, and that is included, but it is deliberately not a mail service.
This page explains what is included, what is not allowed, and where real mailboxes belong.
What Your Site Can Send
Transactional email is mail your site sends because a person did something. It is one message, triggered by one action, going to one recipient. Typical examples:
- Password reset links.
- The new-account email WordPress sends a new user.
- WooCommerce order confirmations, receipts and shipping notices.
- Contact-form notifications arriving in your inbox.
- An admin notice, such as a core update having been applied.
All of that works out of the box. You do not configure anything for it.
It Is Included As A Courtesy
Sending the kind of mail described above is included with your plan. It is meant for the everyday mail a website needs, not for volume. If you run a shop or send a lot of mail, connect your own SMTP provider; it gives you delivery logs and your own sending reputation.
If you expect real volume, or you want your mail leaving under your own sending reputation rather than a shared one, connect your own provider. It is better in both directions. See connect your own SMTP provider.
What Is Not Allowed
This is not a bulk email or marketing service, and sending newsletters or campaigns through it is not allowed. That includes a mailing list plugin that sends your weekly post to three thousand subscribers, an abandoned-cart campaign going to every lapsed customer, and any form of promotional broadcast.
The reason is not meanness. Bulk sending from shared infrastructure wrecks the sending reputation that everyone’s transactional mail depends on, which means one person’s newsletter causes other people’s password resets to land in spam. Marketing mail belongs with a provider built for it, where you get list management, unsubscribe handling, bounce processing and deliverability reporting that this was never meant to provide.
If you want to send campaigns, use a service made for campaigns, or connect your own SMTP provider and send through that.
Oxyforge Does Not Host Mailboxes
You cannot collect mail at name@yourdomain here. There are no mailboxes, no webmail, no IMAP and no POP. Your website can send mail. It cannot receive any.
If you need an address at your own domain that you can read and reply from, use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Both are inexpensive, both are better at mail than any web host, and both are what we would use ourselves.
Those services work by your domain’s MX records pointing at them. Keep those records pointed there and your mail is unaffected by anything to do with your website. See DNS records explained.
Moving a website never moves the mail. If your old host gave you mailboxes bundled with the hosting, sort the mail out before you move the site and before you cancel the old account, because cancelling it deletes the mailboxes and everything in them. This catches people out more than anything else in a migration.
| What you want | Where it happens |
|---|---|
| Password resets and order emails sent | Included here |
| Higher volume, your own reputation | Your own SMTP provider |
| Newsletters and campaigns | A marketing email service |
| An inbox at name@yourdomain | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 |
| Forwarding an address to another inbox | Your DNS or domain provider, not here |
If Mail Is Not Arriving
Transactional mail that leaves the server can still fail to arrive. Work through these.
Check the spam folder first. Especially for Gmail and Outlook recipients, and especially for a brand new site that has never sent anything before.
Check the From address. Set it to an address at the domain the site runs on. A site cannot send as something@gmail.com; mail like that goes out from one of our addresses with yours as the reply-to, which some recipients find confusing. See why your site’s email shows a different sender.
Check the plugin is actually sending. Contact form plugins and WooCommerce both keep a log or a status page. If the plugin thinks it never sent the message, the problem is in the plugin’s settings, not in delivery.
Send a test to two different providers. One to Gmail, one to Outlook or your work address. If one arrives and the other does not, it is a filtering question at the receiving end rather than a sending fault.
If order confirmations matter to your business, do not leave this to chance. Connect your own SMTP provider, verify your domain with the records it gives you, and you get delivery logs showing exactly what happened to each message. For anything you cannot work out, open a ticket from the members area.
Did this answer it? If not, open a ticket from the members area and someone who runs the platform will pick it up.
Open A Ticket