Email hosting
We are committed to making Kinsta the best managed WordPress hosting platform in the industry. As part of that commitment, we don’t provide email as a part of our hosting plans. Due to several reasons, we recommend keeping your email and hosting separately.
Recommended email providers
Sending and receiving email is an integral part of doing business online, so we understand the importance of having a good email provider.
- We always recommend Google Workspace (previously G Suite), which includes Gmail, one of the world’s best email services. It has a lot of features for a great price and allows you to use your own domain name. Many Kinsta clients utilize Google Workspace, and we even have a feature that lets you easily add your Google MX records with just a few clicks.
- Microsoft Outlook, which is part of Microsoft 365, is another reliable email service that you can set up to use with your custom domain.
- Zoho Mail provides email hosting on a secure and encrypted email service.
MX records
MX records are DNS records that direct your domain’s emails to your email provider. It’s important that these records are set up correctly, or you could experience an interruption in your email service.
If you’re using Kinsta’s DNS, you can add Gmail MX records with a few clicks in MyKinsta. If you’re using a different email provider, you can still add the necessary MX records to your domain in Kinsta DNS.
For other DNS providers, we recommend checking their specific documentation for more information on adding or editing MX records.
Sending emails from your website
Your email provider will allow you to send and receive emails from and to your email address, but what about emails you need your site to send? Those are called transactional emails, which are those emails that are generated automatically by your WordPress website in response to some sort of user activity.
At Kinsta, all of our plans include support for transactional email on both Production and Staging sites. We send transactional emails via MailChannels, a secure and reliable email service. The address used for sending emails is called the ‘header from’ address, and you can configure it in WP Admin > Settings > General > Administrator Email Address. Transactional emails use the ‘envelope from’ address if this email address is not set. At Kinsta, we use [email protected] as the ‘envelope from’ address. Some email clients display both the ‘header from’ and ‘envelope from’ addresses. For instance, if your email is ‘[email protected]‘ and your website is ‘mywebsite’, the email might show ‘[email protected] via mywebsite.kinstamailservice.com’.
If you want to change the address used for sending emails but don’t want to change the administrator email address, you can use a plugin such as WP Change Email Sender.
Kinsta’s MailChannels service includes DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) support; this email authentication method uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the domain owner. This protects the domain against malicious emails sent from domains impersonating the kinstamailservice.com domain. If you use a custom domain you must set up DNS records for SPF and DMARC to enforce the email security policy.
Transactional email is email generated automatically by your WordPress website in response to some sort of user activity. For example, all of the following are transactional emails:
- New user registration notification emails.
- Password reset emails.
- Automatic order confirmations generated by WooCommerce or another ecommerce plugin.
- New comment moderation notifications sent to a website administrator.
- Comment reply notifications sent to users who have commented on your website.
This isn’t a complete list, but it illustrates the types of emails that are considered transactional.
What types of emails are not considered to be transactional? Transactional emails are sent automatically in response to user activity. Any email that does not meet that definition would not be considered transactional email. The most common types of non-transactional emails are marketing emails, newsletters, and bulk product availability updates (sent to groups of users at the same time). Kinsta’s servers should not be used to send non-transactional email.
Transactional email limits
While Kinsta does allow transactional email, we do have daily limits on the amount of transactional email allowed. For full details, please see our Acceptable Use Policy.
The daily limits on transactional email are as follows:
- Starter and Pro plans may send up to 150 transactional emails per day.
- Business plans may send up to 1,000 transactional emails per day.
- Agency and Enterprise plans may send up to 3,000 transactional emails per day.
These limits are per plan and include all sites within the plan. For example, if you are on a Business plan with 5 sites and you send 700 transactional emails from 1 site each day, you would only be able to send 300 transactional emails across the other 4 sites per day.
How does Kinsta handle violations?
We have various monitoring tools that count outgoing emails and alert our Support team to violations of our transactional email policy. When a violation is discovered, our Support team will reach out to you to resolve the issue. In most cases, this means encouraging you to find an alternative means to send email. In the case of a significant violation of our policies regarding transactional email, email sending functionality may be temporarily disabled until the issue is resolved.
How can I send non-transactional email or additional transactional email
If you need to send more transactional emails than what we allow or if you need to send non-transactional emails from your WordPress website, you have two options:
- For large volumes of transactional email, you can integrate a third-party transactional email service provider such as Sendgrid, Mailgun, or Mailjet.
- For non-transactional email, you can either integrate a third-party transactional email service provider (to send the email directly from your WordPress site) or switch to a third-party professional email marketing platform such as Mailchimp or any other Mailchimp alternatives.
You can learn more about transactional email service providers and professional email marketing platforms by reading our blog post, Email Marketing Software Recommendations.