Email failure alerts
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Get told straight away when your site cannot send an email, by email, chat, SMS or webhook, and why a non-email channel is the safer choice.
When a password reset or an order receipt fails to send, you want to know before your customers tell you. This article explains the Alerts tab: what triggers an alert, how to set up alert emails, and which other channels are available. It is for site owners and support teams responsible for a site's email.
Open the Alerts tab
Go to CRM-NG SMTP → Settings → Alerts. The first section is Email Failure Alerts.
What triggers an alert
CRM-NG SMTP sends an alert each time your mailer refuses an email or cannot be reached, and the email ends up with the status Failed in the log. This includes failed test emails sent from Tools → Email Test.
You do not get an alert when:
- the backup SMTP transport rescued the email (status Sent-backup),
- the email was stopped on purpose by Do Not Send (status Blocked),
- the email was accepted but later bounced at the recipient's end. That is a delivery event, not a sending failure. See Understanding delivery status.
Every failure sends its own alert. If your mailer goes down on a busy site, you will receive one alert per failed email.
Set up alert emails
- Enter addresses
In Alert email addresses, type one or more addresses. Separate multiple addresses with commas.
- Save
Press Save Alert Settings at the bottom of the tab.
- Test it
Go to Tools → Email Test and send a test while your mailer is deliberately misconfigured, for example with a wrong key on a staging site. Then put the right settings back.
Each alert email has the subject "[Your site name] WordPress email failed" and a short body with the failed email's subject, its From address and the error text.
Why a webhook is recommended
The tab itself warns: Alert emails pass through WordPress mail, so a webhook is recommended when the primary mail service itself may be unavailable.
In plain terms: alert emails go out through the same mailer that just failed. If the failure is "wrong password" or "service down", the alert email fails too, and you hear nothing.
Use at least one non-email channel
For anything important, add a channel that does not depend on your mail service: Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, SMS, WhatsApp or a generic webhook. These are sent straight from your web server over HTTPS.
If you only use email alerts, choose an address on a different provider from your sending domain, so a problem with one does not hide the other.
Other alert channels
All of these live on the same tab and are saved with Save Alert Settings. You can use as many as you like at once.
| Channel | Section on the tab | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Any service that accepts JSON | Generic webhook URL | Generic webhook alerts |
| Slack | Chat and Incident Webhooks | Slack alerts |
| Discord | Chat and Incident Webhooks | Discord alerts |
| Microsoft Teams | Chat and Incident Webhooks | Microsoft Teams alerts |
| SMS | Twilio SMS | SMS alerts with Twilio |
| WhatsApp Cloud API | WhatsApp alerts |
Webhook addresses and tokens are stored encrypted. After saving, their boxes show Saved — leave blank to keep or Token saved. Leave them empty to keep the saved value, or type a new one to replace it.
Non-email alerts are sent in the background with a short time limit. They never slow down or block the page that tried to send the email.
Alerts and the error banner
Separately from these alerts, CRM-NG SMTP shows a banner in the WordPress admin area, CRM-NG SMTP: One or more emails recently failed to send., with a View details link. Alerts reach you when you are not logged in. The banner reminds you when you are.