How to Stop OpenCart Emails Going to Spam by Using SMTP

Posted by Paul on March 13, 2017

Spam email is a massive problem these days and the best defense we have against it is spam filters. Unfortunately though, they are often not intelligent enough to do their job properly and important email can end up there. aganistWhen this starts happening to order confirmation emails and other communication from your online shop, it becomes a serious problem and you're likely to start getting unhappy customers.

There are various things you can do to reduce the likelihood of your shop's emails ending up in spam and in this article we're going to look at one of the most effective, which is sending your emails through an SMTP server rather than the "mail()" function on the web server.

(If you'd rather try and improve the standard "mail()" way first, try this.)

For our purposes here, we'll be giving examples using cPanel because we provide it will all of our hosting for our clients and because we think it's by far the best control panel out there.

To use SMTP you'll need an email account set up for the email address that you'd like your online shop emails to come from. In many cases this is something like info@yourshopname.com, sales@yourshopname.com, sales@yourshopname.com etc. So let's set this up from cPanel:

1. Log in to cPanel, often by going to www.yourshopname.com/cpanel

2. Find the Email Accounts icon and go to it

3. Create your email account, being sure to use a strong password and keep it somewhere safe

4. Once your new email account appears in the list, click on "Set Up Mail Client"

5. Make a note of the mail client settings, paying attention to whether you have an SSL Certificate or not

6. Log in to your OpenCart admin and enter the Outgoing Server settings from the step above

And that's it! Now do a test order to check that all seems to be working and with any luck, your emails should now be much less likely to end up in spam folders.

Important Note: You will need to check what happens when customers reply to the order email they receive - depending on your MX records and forwarding rules, their reply may come to your existing inbox or the new mail account you set up, but be sure that you know which and monitor it accordingly.

As usual, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below or email us for help!