WordPress quickstart

Connect an SMTP plugin you already have to sendvia's relay, send a test email, and find it in your send log. sendvia ships no plugin of its own.

Get an API key

Create a sendvia account and a key is issued immediately, sitting on the Account page, prefixed sv_live_. This is what you paste into the plugin below as a password:

sv_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You also need a domain verified in your account, since WordPress will send from an address on it. Add one under Domains if you have not already, and give its DNS records time to propagate.

Send one email

sendvia ships no WordPress plugin. What it does ship is an SMTP relay, and any plugin that lets WordPress send through a custom SMTP server, such as WP Mail SMTP, Easy WP SMTP or FluentSMTP, can point at it. Install one, then enter these settings where the plugin asks for them:

Set the plugin's "From email" to an address on your verified domain, not the address WordPress picks by default, which is usually [email protected] on whatever domain the site runs on and is rarely one you have verified with sendvia. Most of these plugins have a built-in "send a test email" button; use it in place of writing any code, addressed to yourself.

See it in the log

The test email lands in the same send log as everything else, tagged with an SMTP badge so you can tell it apart from an API send. Check the History page, or query the API with the key from step one:

curl "https://api.sendvia.io/v1/[email protected]" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sv_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

{
  "total": 1,
  "limit": 25,
  "offset": 0,
  "logs": [
    {
      "id": 42,
      "to_address": "[email protected]",
      "from_address": "[email protected]",
      "subject": "Hello from sendvia",
      "status": "delivered",
      "error_message": null,
      "sent_at": "2026-08-20 10:03:01",
      "delivered_at": "2026-08-20 10:05:01"
    }
  ]
}

The row moves from queued to sent within moments of the relay accepting it. Read the status after that carefully: sendvia never receives a delivery confirmation from the recipient's mail server. Two minutes after a clean send it marks the message delivered on its own, an inference from the absence of a bounce rather than a receipt. A real bounce or failure overwrites that status the moment one arrives; nothing plays the same role for an honest delivery. Logs like this stick around for 7 to 90 days, depending on your plan.

Troubleshooting

Neither failure below shows up as an error in the plugin itself: most SMTP plugins report success the moment the relay accepts the message, not whether sendvia was able to do anything with it afterwards. The log is where you actually see which one you hit.

The SES sandbox rejects your test recipient

A new SES account starts inside Amazon's sandbox: 200 emails a day, sent only to recipient addresses you have verified yourself in the SES console, pending an AWS review that usually takes 12 to 24 hours. Send your test to any other address while sandboxed and the log shows status: "failed" with AWS's own rejection reason sitting in error_message, even though the plugin reported success.

Verify the test address in the SES console while you wait, or request production access, which lifts the restriction for every recipient at once.

The domain has not been verified

sendvia checks the domain on the "From email" address against the domains verified on your account, the same rule the REST API enforces as a 422 before it ever calls AWS. This is the mistake WordPress makes easy, because its own default From address rarely matches a domain you have verified. Get it wrong and the message never leaves. There is no error in the plugin to read, so confirm the domain's status directly on the Domains page.

Set the plugin's From email to an address on a verified domain, or add and verify the domain it already points at, then resend the test.