A customer resets their password on your site and the email arrives from “WordPress”, sent by wordpress@yourbusiness.com. Your own form notifications look the same. It is not broken, exactly, but it looks like something nobody set up, and some people will assume it is spam and delete it unread.
Changing the WordPress email from name and address takes a few minutes once you know where the setting lives. The catch is that several plugins can each set their own sender, and the address you choose has to be one your mail service is allowed to send for. This post explains both.
Where “WordPress” and wordpress@ come from
When WordPress sends an email and nothing else has set a sender, core fills in defaults: the name WordPress and the address wordpress@ followed by your site’s domain, with any “www.” removed. So a site at www.yourbusiness.com sends as wordpress@yourbusiness.com.
That wordpress@ sender address usually does not exist as a real mailbox. Nobody can reply to it, and if your domain’s email records do not authorise the server that sends it, receiving mail systems have good reason to treat it with suspicion. Changing the name is about looking professional. Changing the address is about looking professional and being trusted.
Note that this is a different setting from the administration email address under Settings → General. That one decides where WordPress sends its own notices to you. It does not change who emails appear to come from.
Which setting wins
A typical small business site sends mail from several places: WordPress core (password resets, new user emails, update notices), the form plugin (enquiry notifications and auto-replies), and perhaps WooCommerce (order emails). Each can set its own sender. In practice the order works like this:
- An SMTP plugin with its force options switched on overrides everything. Every email leaves with the name and address you set there.
- Otherwise, each plugin’s own sender settings apply to the emails that plugin sends. Your form plugin uses the From set in its notification; WooCommerce uses the sender set in its email settings.
- Anything left over uses the WordPress defaults.
This is why people change the name in one place and still see “WordPress” on some emails. The password reset is coming from core, which nothing has told otherwise.
Changing the WordPress email from name in an SMTP plugin
If your site already sends through an SMTP plugin, this is the best place to set the sender, because it covers every email at once. If it does not yet, setting one up is explained in setting up SMTP in WordPress, and you can come back here afterwards.
WP Mail SMTP
- Open the plugin’s settings page from its menu in the dashboard.
- In From Email, enter the address on your domain that should send site mail.
- Tick Force From Email so other plugins cannot replace it.
- In From Name, enter your business name.
- Tick Force From Name if you want the same name on every email. Leave it unticked if you want, for example, your shop emails to carry a different name set in WooCommerce.
- Save, then send the plugin’s test email to an outside address.
FluentSMTP
FluentSMTP sets the sender on each connection, with a From Email and From Name and similar options to force them. Edit the connection you use, check both fields, and save.
The mail service has the final say
The address you enter must be one your sending service accepts:
- Google Workspace or Gmail connections send as the signed-in account, or as an alias that has been added to that account with Send mail as. Enter any other address and Google will usually replace it with the account’s own address.
- Microsoft 365 expects the mailbox you sign in with, or one it has been given permission to send as.
- Transactional services such as Brevo, Mailgun or Amazon SES send only from domains or addresses you have verified with them.
If you want site mail to come from an address like enquiries@ without a full mailbox, an alias is often the answer. Our post on email aliases and shared mailboxes explains the options.
Setting the sender in your form plugin
If you do not force the sender in an SMTP plugin, or have no SMTP plugin, set it in each form’s notification.
- WPForms: open the form, go to Settings → Notifications, and fill in From Name and From Email. Put the visitor’s email field in Reply-To, not in From.
- Contact Form 7: open the form’s Mail tab. The From field takes a name and address together, written as Your Business <website@yourbusiness.com>. Put the visitor’s email tag in a Reply-To line under Additional headers. Contact Form 7 shows a configuration warning when the From address does not belong to your site’s domain, and that warning is worth taking seriously.
- Other form plugins have equivalent fields in each notification’s settings.
The one rule that matters: never set From to the visitor’s own address, however convenient it seems for replying. Your site is not allowed to send as someone’s Gmail account, and mail that claims to be from it is likely to be rejected. Reply-To gives you the same convenience safely. Who receives each notification is covered separately in sending form notifications to several people.
WooCommerce and other plugins that send mail
WooCommerce has its own sender options under WooCommerce → Settings → Emails, with a “From” name and address used for order emails. Booking, membership and newsletter plugins often have similar settings. Check each plugin that emails customers, or force one sender in your SMTP plugin and stop worrying about them individually.
Without a plugin
WordPress provides two filters, wp_mail_from and wp_mail_from_name, that change the defaults. A developer can add them with a small snippet, using a plugin such as Code Snippets rather than editing the theme. On its own, though, this only changes the label on mail the server still sends by itself, which does nothing to make it trusted. For most sites an SMTP plugin is the better fix.
Choosing a sender name and address
The name should be what customers know you as, usually the business name. Some owners add a hint, such as “Your Business Website”, so staff can tell site mail apart from personal mail.
The address should be on your own domain, and ideally a real mailbox or alias that someone reads. People reply to automatic emails more often than you would expect, and a “noreply” address throws those replies away. Something like website@ or enquiries@ works well.
The domain in the address also has to be authorised to use your sending service, through the SPF and DKIM records in your DNS. If those are new to you, SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained in plain English covers what they do.
If emails stop arriving after the change
Changing the sender address to one your service does not accept, or one whose domain is not authorised, can make delivery worse. If that happens, put the previous setting back first, then check the address against your mail service. If mail was not arriving before you changed anything, that is a delivery problem rather than a naming one, and our troubleshooting post on missing site emails is the place to start.
This task is one part of our guide on how to manage a WordPress website, and the wider topic of forms and site email is covered in the WordPress forms guide.
Frequently asked questions
Should the sender be the same address that receives form notifications?
It can be, and on a small site that is common. A separate address such as website@ makes it easy to filter site mail into its own folder, and changing who receives enquiries then never touches the sender settings. Either way, the address must be one your sending service is allowed to use.
Can I use my Gmail address as the sender for my website emails?
Not reliably. A website that sends mail claiming to be from a Gmail address is not authorised to do so, and receiving servers often reject or filter it. If you connect the site to that Gmail account through an SMTP plugin, it can work, but an address on your own domain looks more professional and is easier to keep trusted.
Does the sender name affect whether my emails land in spam?
The name on its own makes little difference to filters, although a clear business name helps people recognise and open the email. The address matters far more, because filters check whether the sending service is authorised to send for that domain. A sensible name on a properly authorised address is the combination to aim for.
Will changing the sender address break replies to my form notifications?
Not if Reply-To is set to the visitor’s email field. Replies then go to the person who filled in the form, whatever address the notification came from. If you change the sender and replies start going to your own website address, check that each form’s notification has a Reply-To set.
Sender name, address and DNS records work as a set, and each kind of site email deserves its own test. Our WordPress email delivery fix handles that setup as one job if you would rather not piece it together yourself.
Next in this series: How to Test WordPress Forms Before Your Customers Do
