Mailyard – WP SMTP Plugin with Email Failover, Email Log, Amazon SES, Postmark, Resend & Brevo

Mailyard is a WordPress SMTP plugin with a backup plan. Connect Amazon SES, Postmark, Resend, Brevo, or any SMTP server, and every email your site sends — password resets, WooCommerce receipts, form notifications — goes through a real email service instead of your host’s mail server. And if that service fails, Mailyard switches to your backup on the same send, so the email still goes out.

Out of the box, WordPress hands wp_mail() to your web host, and most hosts are bad at email: messages get blocked, land in spam, or vanish without a trace. Mailyard fixes “WordPress not sending emails” — and keeps it fixed when your provider has a bad day.

Everything you see is free. No locked buttons, no crippled features, no upgrade nags. Plugin site: plugpress.co/mailyard.

What you get

• Automatic email failover — a backup SMTP provider takes over the moment the first one fails, on the same send, not in a retry queue
• Six ways to send — Amazon SES, Postmark, Resend, Brevo, custom SMTP, or PHP mail
• Smart sender routing — store receipts through Postmark, newsletters through Brevo: the right provider per from address or purpose, automatically
• Full email log — every send and every failure with the exact provider error; logs clean themselves up after 30 days
• Deliverability checker — grades your SPF, DKIM, DMARC & MX records A–F and hands you the exact DNS record to add
• Bounce & complaint tracking — all four provider webhooks normalized into one mailyard_bounce hook
• AI agent tools (MCP) — let Claude, Cursor, or Codex diagnose your email problems
• 60-second setup — pick a provider, paste a key, send a test; Mailyard warns if another SMTP plugin is fighting you

Why failover matters

Most SMTP plugins log the failure and give up. Mailyard retries the same email on your backup provider immediately — a flaky API key on a Saturday night stops being your problem. SMTP failover is the reason Mailyard exists.

Deliverability, not just delivery

Email that technically sends but lands in spam is still lost. The deliverability checker reads your sending domain’s SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and MX records and tells you exactly which DNS record to fix — usually the difference between the inbox and the spam folder.

AI agents (MCP)

Built on the Abilities API that shipped in WordPress 7.0: any MCP client — Claude, Codex, Cursor — can check your provider and fallback chain, score your DNS records, read the failure log, and send a test once it’s fixed. Settings → Connect AI has a master switch and a per-tool permission for each of the five tools; nothing is exposed until you install an MCP bridge (the free WordPress MCP Adapter plugin), and Mailyard never sends your data anywhere on its own.

Providers you can use

• Resend — easiest to start with
• Brevo (was Sendinblue) — all-in-one email platform
• Postmark — best inbox placement, made for stores
• Amazon SES — cheapest at high volume
• Custom SMTP — any SMTP server or relay, Gmail app passwords included
• Default PHP mail — your host’s server; no setup, but don’t count on it

Mailyard Pro — broadcast email to your customers

Mailyard delivers your site’s email. Mailyard Pro builds email marketing on top of it:

• Broadcast campaigns — write, schedule, and send email to your customers, rate-limited to match your provider
• Notion-style email editor — slash commands, buttons, images, dividers, desktop & mobile preview, bulletproof email HTML
• AI writing assistant — draft and rewrite emails with Claude, using your own Anthropic API key
• Contacts, groups & segments — one deduped contact list, saved dynamic segments, CSV import & export
• Open tracking & campaign analytics — see how every campaign performed, with tracking you can switch off
• Compliance built in — one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058), automatic footer with your business address, GDPR export & erase

Nothing in free Mailyard is held back for Pro, and Mailyard never nags you about it. Get Mailyard Pro →

Who’s behind this

One person — Fahim, in Dhaka, building WordPress plugins since 2011. DiviPeople and DiviTorque come from the same desk and run on 170,000+ sites. When you post in the support forum, the developer answers; there’s no tier-1 script to get past.

Source code

The admin screens are React, built with @wordpress/scripts. The unminified source lives at https://github.com/plugpressco/mailyard under src/ — npm install, then npm run build.

Privacy

Mailyard only talks to the email service you set up. It doesn’t phone home and it doesn’t track you. The deliverability checker reads your domain’s DNS records via your server’s resolver, falling back to Cloudflare’s public DNS only if that fails (it sees the domain name and nothing more). If email logging is on (it is by default), each email’s recipient, subject, and body are saved to your database — turn it off in Settings whenever you want.

External services

Mailyard sends your WordPress email through a third-party email service that you choose and set up with your own account and API key. Nothing is sent anywhere until you pick a provider and enter its credentials, and then it only goes to that one provider (plus its fallback, if you added one).

What gets sent is the email your site is already trying to send: the recipient address(es), the sender, the subject, the body, and any attachments. It’s sent at the moment WordPress sends that email — a password reset, a WooCommerce order, a contact-form reply, and so on.

Resend — email delivery API, used if you pick Resend. Each email goes to https://api.resend.com/emails. Terms: https://resend.com/legal/terms-of-service — Privacy: https://resend.com/legal/privacy-policy

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) — email delivery API, used if you pick Brevo. Each email goes to https://api.brevo.com/v3/smtp/email. Terms: https://www.brevo.com/legal/termsofuse/ — Privacy: https://www.brevo.com/legal/privacypolicy/

Postmark — email delivery API, used if you pick Postmark. Each email goes to https://api.postmarkapp.com/email. Terms: https://postmarkapp.com/terms-of-service — Privacy: https://postmarkapp.com/privacy-policy

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) — Amazon’s email delivery API, used if you pick Amazon SES. Each email goes to https://email.{your-region}.amazonaws.com/v2/email/outbound-emails. If you turn on bounce/complaint webhooks for SES, Mailyard also confirms the Amazon SNS subscription with a one-time request to the AWS-hosted SubscribeURL (it checks the host is on amazonaws.com first). Terms: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ — Privacy: https://aws.amazon.com/privacy/

Custom SMTP — if you pick the Custom SMTP option, email goes to the SMTP host and port you enter. That’s whatever SMTP service or server you choose, so check its own terms and privacy policy.

Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS — only used by the deliverability checker, and only as a fallback when your server’s own DNS lookup fails. It sends just your domain name (to read SPF/DKIM/DMARC/MX records) to https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query. No email content is involved. Terms: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ — Privacy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns-resolver/