So you are having trouble getting the wonderful Gmail/Google Apps/Google for Work/ Now G Suite email to work with your WordPress site or your Gravity Forms Plugin. Then you are in the right place.
We use G Suite here at DSKnights and we recommend it to our clients. Web hosts are finally getting away from hosting email on the same web server as the web site, which I am a fan of, other not so much. As you already know this creates a bit more work on our part or you would not be here reading about this.
In this article we are assuming that you already have your WordPress site set up and you already have your G Suite email set up, if not you will want to get that done and return for the step by step of how to get them working together.
This is a free option and if you are just wanting your registration email or Gravity form submissions to go through this, you will do fine, that said if you are doing a new letter or any other type of mass email you might want to consider many of the other paid SMTP service providers out there. They have a bunch of them and they all cost and work about the same.
First thing you might want to go get the Gmail SMTP Plugin This is the plugin we are going to configure to make this work. You can search for Gmail SMTP and install this like any other plugin from the plugins page in the WordPress admin area click the install now button and then click activate.
You will notice the success “Plugin activated” statement and a statement letting you know you can not use the plugin until it is configured, no worries, I am going to walk you through that too.
You can get to the settings for the Gmail SMTP from the WordPress Plugin list or you can find the Gmail SMTP in the Settings menu. once you get to the settings page you will see below.
Now you are going to want to click on the link web application and login in to google developer console. your going to want to use an email address that you are planning on being the from email address for the web site. IE if you are going to be using [email protected] to send the emails from that will be the email address you will want to login to google developer console with, so if the email does not exist you can not use it to send from. You will need the email and password for G Suite for that email address to login and create this web app.
You will now need to agree to the terms of services, you can choose to receive the announcements or not, I have chosen not to receive them in the image above. Now click on the agree and continue. you will see a pop up saying it is creating your project. once it is finished you will see below.
Click the link go to credentials and we will continue.
You will want to choose Gmail API which is already selected for you and you will want to choose Web browser (Javascript) for where you will be calling the API from.
What data will you be accessing? Choose User Data like pictured above. now click that What credentials do I need button, it will open up the next part.
ok so give it a name you want maybe sitename SMTP, type in teh web site address making sure to include the https:// or https://sitename.com and where it is asking for the Authorized Redirect URI, you can find that in teh admin area of the Gmail SMTP shown below.
Copy and paste that in and continue on, you will now be taken to your
OAuth 2.0 client IDs page and you will see the OAuth you created.
Click on that bad boy and you will get the client id and client secret it is asking for in your WordPress admin area of your Gmail SMTP plugin settings Like below, simply copy and paste them in from the Google developer console to your settings area and then you are done with your Google developer console, the rest can be done in your admin settings in your site.
So from here it pretty much give you the instructions inline in the form like below
Make sure to read the instructions below each form field it will give you the answer you are looking for. IE can I use any email address I want? no you have to use the one you signed in at the Google developer console with, etc..
Type of encryption? leave it on TLS
SMTP Port? Use the 587
Disable the SSL Certificate Verification? if it is checked uncheck it, if not leave it be.
Save Changes, when you do that a new blue button will appear on that same page under the save changes button, click it to authorize the app to your site, you will be taken to google asking for authorization. say yep, i wanna. and whew’ your done! send a test email form within your Gmail SMTP settings page under the test email tab at the top.
Say yeah me when it works!
I hope this was useful, feel free to share this article, thanks for taking the time to learn with me.
