Post SMTP alternative

The Post SMTP Alternative, Run For You

Get It On WordPress.org See What It Does Small plugin, narrow job.

What makes it different

One provider, not twenty
Free with nothing held back
Honest about the beta
No snippets in functions.php
Your log, your database
Built by people who run sites

The short version

The short case for Cascadia over Post SMTP

Most SMTP plugins support twenty providers at once, and the settings screen shows it.

What you get here

  • Replaces wp_mail Completely
  • Cloudflare Email Sending API
  • Custom From Address
  • Custom From Name
  • Test Send And Verification
  • Full Email Log
  • Log Retention Controls
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What ships in the standard plan here

Everything in this list ships as standard.

  • Replaces wp_mail Completely
  • Cloudflare Email Sending API
  • Custom From Address
  • Custom From Name
  • Test Send And Verification
  • Full Email Log
  • Log Retention Controls
See Email Delivery for Cloudflare

Where the service earns its keep

The plugin is deliberately narrow. It carries configuration for Cloudflare Email Service and nothing else, and it keeps a full email log on your own site, so a question about a missing message has somewhere to be answered.

Built by people who run sites

We manage WordPress sites for a living, and this began as an internal tool for a problem we kept running into. It shows in what got built.

One provider, not twenty

A multi-provider SMTP plugin has to carry configuration for every service it supports. Most of that surface is noise on your site, because you are only ever going to use one of them.

Free with nothing held back

We built it for our managed clients, who needed the thing to work. It was never meant to be the front end of a paid tier.

Honest about the beta

Cloudflare Email Service is still in beta, and Cloudflare says its APIs may change. That belongs on this page, not in a support conversation after you have already moved a store’s receipts onto it.

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Who this comparison is for

Developers who want mail out of PHP

You would happily never look at your host’s sendmail configuration again.

Sites already running on Cloudflare Workers

Bringing in a separate email vendor adds a bill, an API key, and one more dashboard to keep track of. Email Sending is covered by what you already pay for, so use it.

WooCommerce stores losing order receipts

Routing wp_mail through an authenticated service handles the delivery side. The log handles the other half, which is knowing which orders got their email and which did not.

How the plugin sends your WordPress email

Four steps, and only the first one takes any real thought. Get the Cloudflare side ready, connect the plugin, then confirm it with a test send.

  1. 1

    We assess your current setup

    First we look at how things run today: what you already pay for, what is configured where, and which parts are actually causing you trouble.

  2. 2

    Get your Cloudflare account ready

    Have your Account ID and token in hand before you move on.

  3. 3

    Install and connect the plugin

    Nothing else in WordPress has to change.

  4. 4

    Run a test send and check the log

    If it arrives, wp_mail is going through Cloudflare and every plugin on the site inherits that immediately. If it does not, the error names the culprit: the token, the domain, or the from address.

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What clients say about working with Cascadia

“I’ve always dreaded website management, but Cascadia has done an incredible job with my WordPress site, making it one less thing for me to worry about.”
Alex R.
Cascadia client
“I’ve worked with Cascadia for several years now. They are always ready to help in any way I ask and can implement my ideas with ease. A company that values their clients!”
Liz D.
Cascadia client
“Cascadia has been great to work with! We recently needed some updates, and Cascadia was quick to get them completed! We highly recommend Cascadia Web Services.”
Naomi T.
Cascadia client
“Cascadia is very responsive and we’re happy with them as our primary IT vendor.”
Royle J.
Cascadia client
“They do great work, been using for years. Prompt responses to requests.”
Brian M.
Cascadia client

Ready when you are

Talk to us about your setup

Ask us

Post SMTP alternative questions

Straight answers about switching, pricing, and what moves with you.
How is Cascadia different from Post SMTP?
The main difference is that it was built by people who run sites. We manage WordPress sites for a living, and this began as an internal tool for a problem we kept running into. It shows in what got built.
Yes. The plugin costs nothing, has no paid tier, no license key, and no features held back behind an upgrade. You install it from the WordPress Plugin Directory the same way you install any other free plugin. What is not free is the sending service behind it, which belongs to Cloudflare rather than to us. That distinction matters enough that we cover it in the next answer.
Yes, on Cloudflare’s side. Email Sending is available on the Cloudflare Workers Paid plan, so you need that plan on the account you send from. You also need the sending domain onboarded for Email Sending on the account that owns your API token. The plugin cannot work around either requirement. If you already run Workers Paid, there is nothing further to buy.
It is Cloudflare’s email product for developers, combining outbound sending with inbound routing under one service. It is built for transactional mail: password resets, order confirmations, verification messages, and alerts. You can reach it from Workers using a native binding, from any platform over its REST API, or over authenticated SMTP. This plugin uses the REST API, which is what lets ordinary WordPress talk to it without custom code.
Email Routing handles mail coming in, forwarding messages sent to addresses on your domain somewhere else. Email Sending handles mail going out. They sit under the same Cloudflare Email Service umbrella but solve opposite problems. This plugin is concerned only with outbound mail from your WordPress site, so Routing is not required, and switching it on will not make your site’s email start sending.
Three things. A Cloudflare account on the Workers Paid plan, the domain you intend to send from onboarded for Email Sending on that account, and a Cloudflare API token with permission to send. Have those ready before you install, because the plugin’s job is to use them, not to create them. Setup inside WordPress takes a couple of minutes once the token is in hand.
Install and activate the plugin, then open its settings screen. Enter your Cloudflare Account ID and paste your Cloudflare API token. Set the from address and from name you want the site to use, save, then run the test send. If the test message arrives, WordPress is sending through Cloudflare and you are done.
Yes, as long as the plugin sends through wp_mail, which the overwhelming majority do. Because this plugin replaces wp_mail itself rather than hooking one plugin at a time, anything built on the standard WordPress mail function is covered the moment you activate it. The rare exception is a plugin that opens its own connection and bypasses wp_mail entirely. Those are uncommon.
Most shared hosts either block outbound mail or send it unauthenticated from an IP with no reputation attached. Mailbox providers see a message claiming to come from your domain with nothing backing that claim, so they drop it or file it as spam. Nothing errors along the way, which is why the site looks fine while receipts and password resets never land.
Each entry holds the recipient, the subject, the time the message went out, and the delivery status the send returned. That covers the question you usually have, which is whether the message left at all and when. If a customer says a receipt never arrived, you check the log first and know right away whether to look at your site or at their inbox.
For as long as you tell the plugin to keep them. Retention is a setting, so you decide how much history is worth holding on to. A low volume site can keep months without noticing. A busy store sending hundreds of messages a day will want a shorter window, because the log lives in your database and an unbounded table gets expensive to carry through every backup.
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