How to set up email on Cloudways (it isn't included)

Cloudways does not include email hosting on any plan, so you set up mailboxes and website mail separately. For addresses people read, such as you@yourdomain.com, use the Rackspace add-on at $1.50 per mailbox per month, or an outside provider like Google Workspace. For mail your site sends, such as contact form notifications and order confirmations, connect the Elastic Email add-on or the free SMTP add-on, and add SPF and DKIM records to your domain.

Mixing these two jobs up is the source of most email problems on Cloudways. This guide explains the difference, walks through each set-up, and covers the faults that show up most often.

Two kinds of email, two solutions

Mailboxes are where people send and receive messages, in Outlook, Apple Mail or a webmail page. They need a mail provider that stores messages and handles spam.

Transactional email is what your website sends automatically: password resets, form notifications, WooCommerce receipts. It needs a sending service with a good reputation, because mail sent directly from a cloud server is often rejected or filtered. Cloud providers' IP addresses are frequent sources of spam, and Vultr and Google Cloud block the standard mail port 25 entirely.

Cloudways offers an add-on for each: Rackspace for mailboxes, and Elastic Email or a free SMTP connector for transactional mail. You can also use outside providers for both, and many people do.

Setting up mailboxes

Your options, roughly from cheapest to most capable:

• Rackspace through Cloudways, $1.50 per mailbox per month. 25 GB mailboxes with IMAP for Outlook and phones, webmail, and domain aliases. Activate it from Integrations, tell Cloudways how many mailboxes you need, and billing appears on your Cloudways invoice, pro-rated by day. Moving existing mail in costs $10 per mailbox.
• Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. More expensive per user, but with calendars, documents and video calls included. The right choice if your business already uses them.
• Zoho Mail or another dedicated mail host. Cheaper per user than Google or Microsoft, with fewer extras.

Whichever you choose, the provider gives you MX records to add at your domain's DNS. MX records control where incoming mail goes and are completely separate from the A record that points your website at your Cloudways server. When you migrate a site, change only the A records. Touching MX records by accident is the usual way people lose a day of email.

Making WordPress send mail reliably

Each Cloudways server has an SMTP section in Server Management. You can use one transactional email option per server.

Option one: the Elastic Email add-on

1. Subscribe. Go to Integrations, View All, then Elastic Email, and pick a package based on how many emails your sites send each month. Start low; you can move up.
2. Bind it to the server. Open the server, go to SMTP under Server Management, choose Elastic Email and click Enable. One package can serve several servers, and every application on a bound server uses it.
3. Verify your domain. Add the DNS records Elastic Email gives you. The SPF record is a TXT record on @ containing v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.elasticemail.com ~all, alongside DKIM and other records. Emails will not send until the domain is verified.
4. Test. Send a test from the SMTP page, then trigger a real email from your site, such as a password reset.

Option two: the free SMTP add-on

If you already have an account with SendGrid, Mailgun, Mandrill or another sending service, choose the SMTP add-on in the same SMTP section and enter that provider's server, port (usually 587), username and password. The add-on is free; you pay your provider. For very low volumes, you can use a Gmail or Google Workspace account, with limits of roughly 500 messages a day on free Gmail and 2,000 on Workspace.

The SMTP add-on applies to every application on the server. If you need different senders for different sites, use a plugin such as WP Mail SMTP in each WordPress install instead, with each site's own provider credentials.

The DNS records that decide deliverability

Receiving mail servers check that your sending service is allowed to send for your domain. Three records do that work:

• SPF lists the services allowed to send as your domain. You can only have one SPF record per domain, so if you use Rackspace for mailboxes and Elastic Email for your site, merge them into a single record, for example v=spf1 a mx include:emailsrvr.com include:_spf.elasticemail.com ~all. Two separate SPF records break both.
• DKIM adds a signature your sending service creates. Each service gives you its own DKIM record, and you add all of them.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails. Start with a monitoring-only policy and tighten it once reports look clean.

Our guide to pointing a domain at Cloudways covers where these records go at common DNS providers.

When email does not work

• WordPress says it sent the mail, but nothing arrives. No transactional add-on is configured, so the server is sending directly and being filtered. Set up Elastic Email or SMTP.
• Mail lands in spam. Check the "From" address uses your own domain, not a free address, and that SPF and DKIM pass. Mail testers such as mail-tester.com show which check fails.
• Connection timeouts in the SMTP plugin. You are probably using port 25, which some providers block. Use 587 with TLS.
• Incoming email stopped after a migration. The MX records were changed or deleted. Restore them to your mail provider's values.
• Rackspace refuses to send newsletters. Rackspace mailboxes have outgoing rate limits and are not for bulk mail. Use a newsletter platform or a transactional service.

What this costs in practice

A small business with five people and a WordPress site would pay $7.50 a month for five Rackspace mailboxes and either nothing for the SMTP add-on with a free-tier sending service, or the smallest Elastic Email package. Against hosts that bundle email, such as SiteGround or Hostinger, that is an extra cost and an extra set-up step, which our Cloudways vs SiteGround comparison weighs up. The upside is separation: a problem on your web server never takes your inbox down with it.

If you are setting up a new Cloudways server, configure transactional email before launch day; our WordPress setup guide puts it in order with the other steps.