sirius-press/docs/smtp.md

Sending real email

Sirius Press does not disable wp_mail(). Contact forms, order receipts, newsletters and every other reason a site has to send a human an email still work — you just have to configure a way to send them, exactly as you would on any WordPress site that is not running on a shared host with a mail server already attached.

What the fork removes is email as an identity. What it leaves alone is email as a feature. Those are different things, and conflating them is how people end up believing the fork is more restrictive than it is.

---

What happens without SMTP

Mail to your site's own .invalid placeholder addresses never reaches a mail transport at all. It goes to the Sirius Press inbox — Inbox in the admin menu — where the account holder reads it while signed in. Password-reset attempts, comment-moderation notices and update nags all land there.

Mail to a real address is handed to PHP's mail(). In the Docker stack there is no mail transport in the container, so it fails. That is the same failure stock WordPress has in the same situation, reported the same way.

---

Setting up SMTP

Any of the usual plugins work, because wp_mail() is untouched: WP Mail SMTP, Post SMTP, FluentSMTP. Install one, point it at a provider, done.

Without a plugin, the phpmailer_init hook is enough:

// wp-content/mu-plugins/smtp.php
add_action( 'phpmailer_init', function ( $mailer ) {
	$mailer->isSMTP();
	$mailer->Host       = 'smtp.example.net';
	$mailer->Port       = 587;
	$mailer->SMTPAuth   = true;
	$mailer->SMTPSecure = 'tls';
	$mailer->Username   = 'postmaster@example.net';
	// Keep the secret in wp-config.php, not here, so it stays out of backups
	// that include wp-content.
	$mailer->Password   = defined( 'SMTP_PASSWORD' ) ? SMTP_PASSWORD : '';
	$mailer->From       = 'hello@example.net';
	$mailer->FromName   = get_bloginfo( 'name' );
} );

A must-use plugin rather than a theme function: it should survive a theme change, and it should not be editable from the plugin editor in wp-admin.

---

Choosing a From address

The one thing that will not work is sending from a .invalid address. Most providers reject it outright, and the ones that do not will have every message binned for failing SPF.

So a site that sends mail needs one real domain, for outbound only. This is slightly awkward for a project whose point is not depending on the DNS system, and worth being honest about: if your site sends email, you have a dependency on somebody's DNS, and no amount of BCNR changes that. Email is a DNS protocol.

Two ways to live with it:

• Accept it, narrowly. Register a domain used for nothing but outbound mail. It has no bearing on how readers reach your site, and if it disappears you lose contact-form delivery rather than your site.
• Avoid sending. Use the inbox for anything addressed to an account holder, and for contact forms use a plugin that stores submissions in the database and shows them in wp-admin instead of mailing them. For most small sites this is better anyway: you read submissions where you already are, and there is no provider to pay or be cut off by.

The second is what a Sirius Press site does by default if you never configure anything, which is deliberate.

---

Checking it works

Send yourself something:

wp eval 'var_dump( wp_mail( "you@example.net", "Sirius Press test", "It sends." ) );'

true means PHPMailer accepted it, not that it arrived. If it returns true and nothing turns up, the problem is between your provider and the recipient — SPF, DKIM or a spam filter — and is no longer anything to do with this fork.

To confirm the placeholder interception is working, mail one of your own accounts. It should return true, nothing should leave the server, and the message should be sitting in that account's inbox.