How to Setup WordPress Email Logs (and WooCommerce Email Logs)

Do you want to set up email logs on your WordPress or WooCommerce website?

Email logs allow you to monitor the emails sent by your WordPress site to the users. This helps you troubleshoot issues and check the status of email notifications sent by your WordPress website.

In this article, we will show you how to set up WordPress email logs and WooCommerce email logs easily.

After following this tutorial, you’ll be able to view the email logs directly from your WordPress admin area in an easy-to-understand format.

Why Set Up Email Logs in WordPress or WooCommerce?

Whether you are running a small business website using WordPress or a WooCommerce store, WordPress automatically sends certain email notifications to your users.

On a typical WordPress website, these emails include password reset emails, new user notifications, password change notifications, comments, and WordPress update notifications.

If you are also running an online store, then email becomes even more important. WooCommerce will send out customer receipts, order details, new order notifications, and user account emails regularly.

As you can see, email notifications are crucial for your website to function properly and deliver the best user experience.

You need to make sure that those emails reach users’ inboxes and don’t just disappear or end up in spam.

The best way to do this is to use a proper SMTP service provider to ensure email deliverability. For more details, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

You would also want to see which emails are sent and to whom. This allows you to keep a record of email activity which comes in handy in several situations.

Following are just a few of those situations when an email log comes in handy:

• Ensure that email notifications are delivered promptly
• Track your WordPress contact form plugin emails
• You can see if emails sent by a plugin are working
• Keep track of user activity using the email logs
• Track user activity if you run a membership website or sell online courses
• Keep an email log of your WooCommerce orders, receipts, and customer notifications

That being said, let’s see how to easily set up email logs on your WordPress or WooCommerce website.

Setting up Email Logs in WordPress & WooCommerce

For this tutorial, we will be using the WP Mail SMTP plugin. It allows you to send WordPress emails using any SMTP service provider, including Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc.

Step 1. Install and Setup WP Mail SMTP

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Mail SMTP plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit WP Mail SMTP » Settings page to configure the plugin settings.

First, you’ll need to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the WP Mail SMTP website.

Simply, copy and paste your license key and then click on the Verify button.

After that, you need to scroll down to select how you would like to send your WordPress emails under the Mailer section.

WP Mail SMTP works with any SMTP service. It has easy configuration options for the most popular SMTP service providers like Gmail, Outlook, Sendinblue, Mailgun, Sendgrid, Amazon SES, or Other SMTP services.

Clicking on the mailer will show you instructions to set it up.

The default option is set to PHP mailer. We don’t recommend using that because it is not reliable. Since most WordPress hosting servers are not properly configured for emails, this option will mean that your WordPress emails may never reach users’ inboxes or even spam folders.

We recommend using a provider like Sendinblue or Mailgun that’s optimized for the best email deliverability.

If you choose Other SMTP as your mailer option, then you’ll need to provide SMTP settings which you can get from your SMTP service provider’s website.

• SMTP Host: Your SMTP host address which usually looks like this smtp.yoursmtpserver.com
• Encryption: Usually, it is either SSL or TLS
• SMTP Port: Usually, it is 465
• Authentication: Turn on the authentication
• Username: The username provided by your SMTP service. Usually, it is your email address
• Password: Password for your SMTP service

After entering your mailer credentials, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Settings’ button to store your settings.

Bonus: It’s important to use a professional business email address to ensure your emails look trustworthy.

Step 2. Enable Email Log Feature

Now that you have set up mailer settings in the WP Mail SMTP plugin. It is time to turn on the email logging feature.

From the plugin’s settings page, switch to the ‘Email Log’ tab and check the box next to ‘Enable log’ option.

The email log option will save general and troubleshooting information about each email message, including the date and time, subject, email status, email addresses of the sender and recipient, BCC and CC, and attachments.

The plugin also allows you to enable complete WordPress email logs. We don’t recommend enabling complete email logs because it would save all email contents, including private or sensitive information in your WordPress database, as plain text.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save settings’ button to save your changes.

Step 3. Testing WP Mail SMTP Setup

Now that you have set up the WP Mail SMTP plugin, let’s test it to make sure that everything is working as expected.

WP Mail SMTP makes this step easy. Go to the plugins settings page WP Mail SMTP » Settings page and switch to the ‘Email Test’ tab.

From here, simply enter your email address and click on the ‘Send Email’ button.

The plugin will now send a test email to the address you provided. It will then show you the status of the email delivery on the screen.

Step 4. Viewing Your Email Logs in WordPress

You can view your WordPress email logs anytime without leaving the WordPress admin area.

Simply go to WP Mail SMTP » Email Log page. You’ll see the log with a list of entries since you enabled the email log.

To view entry details, take your mouse over it and then click on the ‘View’ link below it. This will open the email log entry with a detailed view.

You can use the search feature to look for entries by email address, subject, header, or content (if you enabled content logging).

You can also delete older entries from your email log. Simply use the ‘Delete’ link below any entry to delete a single entry.

To delete multiple entries, you need to select each email and then click on the Bulk Actions drop-down menu to select ‘Delete’.

After that, you should click on the Apply button.

If you need to analyze your email logs more carefully or create your own deliverability reports, then you can export your logs to your favorite spreadsheet software or email client.

You can also easily resend an email that has failed.

WP Mail SMTP Pro subscribers can visualize their email deliverability in a chart that shows how many emails were sent, opened, and clicked each day.

This is super useful for WooCommerce users.

It’s easy to check the engagement of each campaign or newsletter. The logs include open and click counts for each email subject.

Clicking the graph button displays a chart of how the specific email is performing.

And every week, WP Mail SMTP will email you a helpful summary of your email performance statistics.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up WordPress email logs and WooCommerce email logs. You may also want to see our guide on how to monitor user activity in WordPress with security audit logs or check out our list of must have plugins to grow your site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.