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How To Set Up the Sendinblue Mailer With WP Mail SMTP

Updated: Mar 24, 2023, 16:59 PM

By Renee DeCoskey

Writer

REVIEWED By Claire Broadley

Content Manager

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Want to use the Sendinblue mailer to get reliable email deliverability on your WordPress site? Sendinblue is a solid mailer option for WP Mail SMTP because it’s both super reliable and has a straightforward setup.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you exactly how to use the Sendinblue mailer in WP Mail SMTP.

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What Is Sendinblue Email?

Sendinblue is a cloud-based digital marketing service. It offers a popular email marketing platform and reliable email deliverability solutions. It also works great when paired with WP Mail SMTP.

Sendinblue offers both free and paid pricing plans, depending on how many emails you want to send. The free plan includes up to 300 sent emails per day. This is usually more than enough for many small business websites.

How to Set Up the Sendinblue Mailer With WP Mail SMTP

Follow this step-by-step tutorial to connect and use your Sendinblue mailer with WP Mail SMTP.

Step 1: Activate Your Sendinblue Account

This is a critical step, so don’t skip it!

To get started, you’ll need to have a Sendinblue account. If you don’t have one yet, you can click here to create a Sendinblue account. There’s no credit card required to sign up.

You’ll receive an email from Sendinblue asking you to confirm your email address. Click the Confirm My Email Address button in that email.

When you confirm your email address, you’ll be redirected back to your Sendinblue account page to provide some information about yourself and your business.

After filling out the form with the requested information, you’ll have the opportunity to select a plan. The setup process is the same for all plans.

When you’ve selected your plan, you can authorize your domain.

Step 2: Authorize Your Domain

Next, you’ll authorize your domain. This ensures successful email delivery.

Ideally, for this step, you will use an email address at a domain that you own. Although you can use Gmail, Outlook, and others, a domain-specific email improves reliability. We strongly recommend using your own domain-specific email address.

Setting Up Your Domain in Sendinblue

To start domain verification, sign in to Sendinblue. After logging in, click on your company in the top right corner to access the dropdown menu. From this menu, select Senders & IP.

On the page that opens, select the option for Domains.

On the next page, click on the button to Add a Domain.

From there, add your domain name and save it.

Add DNS Records

Domain authorization is crucial to reliable email delivery. It also protects site owners and visitors. For Sendinblue to authorize your domain, you must add 2 TXT records to your site’s DNS settings.

After adding your domain, as we did in the previous step, you should see it appear on the Domains page in Sendinblue. Click the Verify link below it.

Note that we’re using example.com for our domain in the examples below. You should replace that with your own domain or subdomain name.

After clicking Verify, a page opens with 2 records. One is the Sendinblue code, and the other is a DKIM record. Keep this page open.

In a new window or tab, log in to the service where you purchased your site’s domain. This is often your hosting provider.

Locate your site’s DNS settings. When you look at those, there should be an option to add a new record. The 2 records you’ll need to add are TXT Record (Sendinblue Code) and TXT (DKIM) Record.

You’ll get this information from the Sendinblue tab we just left open after clicking to verify.

Adding the TXT Record (Sendinblue Code)

From your hosting provider page we opened a moment ago, click the option to add a new record. Now we’re going to add the TXT Record (Sendinblue code).

You’ll get this information from the Sendinblue window or tab we left open.

Copy the value and paste it into the appropriate DNS settings on your site. Be careful to copy it exactly or verification won’t work.

Adding the TXT (DKIM) Record

Next, add the TXT (DKIM) Record. This information will also be in your Sendinblue account, right below the Sendinblue Code record.

Once again, carefully copy and paste the value into your site’s DNS settings.

Verify Your DNS Records

After you’ve added the records to your site’s DNS settings, it could take up to 48 hours for Sendinblue to verify them. This isn’t always the case, however.

Back on your Sendinblue page with the records still open, you can try the Verify & Authenticate button at the bottom.

When Sendinblue verifies your record, you’ll see a green check mark with “Value Matched” next to the record.

Even though this step might take some time to complete, you don’t have to wait for the verification to move on to the next steps while it’s in progress. You can get started on setting up WP Mail SMTP.

Step 3: Set Up WP Mail SMTP

Next, we’ll switch over to setting up WP Mail SMTP. Before we get started on this step, be sure to install and activate the WP Mail SMTP plugin.

Once WP Mail SMTP is installed, click on WP Mail SMTP in the WordPress menu on the left-hand side to open the plugin Settings page.

From Email

The From Email is the email address from which all your site’s emails will be sent. This should be a domain-specific email address like [email protected].

If you’d like the From Email to be the same site-wide, you can check the box labeled Force From Email. This will save you the trouble of editing the email settings throughout your site, including in all form emails.

We strongly recommend you check this box.

From Name

The From Name will be set to the site name by default. However, you can change this to any text you’d like.

You can also check the box next to Force From Name to apply this setting to all emails across your site.

Mailer

Next, In the Mailer section, select the Sendinblue option.

API Key

After you select Sendinblue as your mailer, more mailer-specific settings will become available.

The first thing you need to do is enter your API key.

Go back to the window or tab where you have your Sendinblue account open. From the dropdown menu in the top right corner, select SMTP & API.

When that page opens, click on API Keys and you can generate a v3 API key to use.

After clicking that link, you’ll see a prompt to name your API key. We recommend choosing something related to your site domain.

After you’ve named the API key, click the Generate button.

The next modal that opens will display the API key. To copy it for use in WordPress, use the copy icon next to the key.

It’s critical that this key is copied exactly as-is.

After you’ve copied it, you can switch back to the window or tab with WP Mail SMTP and return to your Sendinblue setup.

Paste the API key and save your settings.

Sending Domain

The Sending Domain is an optional setting that allows Sendinblue to check for any domain-side errors in your Sendinblue setup. This could include misconfiguration or missing SPF records.

This check will run every time you send a test email. You’ll only receive a notification if an issue is detected.

If you use this setting, you should use the same domain you’ve already authorized in Sendinblue. For example, if we authorized the domain example.com in Sendinblue, that’s what we would enter in the Sending Domain field.

Backup Connection

The last option you’ll see in the setup process is to establish a backup connection. This is also optional, but it’s useful for improving email deliverability in the event of primary connection failure.

If you click the additional connection link, you can go through the setup process again, choosing a secondary mailer. Once that mailer is connected, you’ll be able to select it and save.

This completes the setup process, so now you’re ready to send a test email!

Step 4: Send a Test Email

Now that your Sendinblue setup is complete, it’s time to send a test email to make sure everything is working the way it should. To do this, make sure you’re on the Settings » WP Mail SMTP page and then click the Email Test tab.

This field will already have your WordPress website’s admin email entered here, but you can enter any email address that you have access to.

Unless you know for sure that you will only be sending plaintext emails from your site, we highly recommend leaving the HTML toggle on.

Click on the Send Email button.

After sending the email, you should see a success message.

Check the email for the address you entered for the test. You should see the email test message in your inbox.

That’s it! You have successfully set up your site to send WordPress emails with the Sendinblue mailer in WP Mail SMTP.

Common Errors and What To Do

If your test email isn’t sending, you should see a debug log with additional details. Here are some details regarding some of the most common errors.

Permission Denied Error, Unable to Send Email

See this error?[permission_denied]: Unable to send email. Your SMTP account is not yet activated.

This means that your account still needs to be activated. If you’ve gone through all of the steps in this post and you still see that error, you might need to contact Sendinblue’s support team for further assistance or to manually activate your account.

Unauthorized: Key Not Found

It’s crucially important to make sure you’re copying and pasting the API key correctly. Missing digits can prevent authorization and cause an error like this:

unauthorized: key not found

This means your API key is not configured correctly. In addition to missing digits in the copying process, this also happens when users copy the masked version of the API key.

To resolve this issue, generate a new API key from your Sendinblue dashboard and use the new key to complete setup.

Other Mailer Options in WP Mail SMTP

Also, if you’re interested in trying a different mailer option than Sendinblue with your WP Mail SMTP set up, or if you want to set up a backup connection, here are some other options to check out:

And there you have it! Now you know how to set up WordPress email notifications with Sendinblue using WP Mail SMTP.

Next, Get Started With Creating Forms

So now that your emails are working, you can get started by setting up a simple contact form and start getting form notifications whenever someone fills out your form.