MailerSend review: our verdict after testing this transactional email tool

A customer places an order on your WooCommerce store? “Boom,” a confirmation email goes out instantly. 

A user asks to reset their password? “Bam,” off goes another email down the pipes. 

Sent automatically, these emails, known as transactional emails, play a key role in how smoothly your site runs and in the customer experience.

Except when… the machine jams and a few hiccups creep in. In other words: when the emails in question never reach their destination. 

In that case, you’re better off relying on a suitable tool to send them, customize them, and track their delivery.

In this space, MailerSend has managed to stand out over the past few years, with one promise: combining deliverability, ease of use, and advanced features.

But how good is this tool, really? Is it a good fit for your WordPress site? And can you really use it without being a developer?

To answer all these questions, check out our MailerSend review, covering its features, pricing, pros, and cons.

The goal: keep your emails going “Boom” and “Bam,” without ever going “Pfft”! 

Transparency note: This article is sponsored and contains affiliate links to MailerSend. If you sign up for a plan through these links, WPMarmite may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. This partnership helps fund our editorial work without influencing our opinion: we remain free to highlight both the strengths and the limitations of the tool.

What is MailerSend?

An overview of MailerSend

MailerSend is a service that specializes in sending, receiving, and tracking transactional emails. It lets you connect a website or an application to a dedicated sending infrastructure, using an API or an SMTP server.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a tool that allows two different applications or services to exchange data and features with each other.
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This protocol is used to send and route an email from the sender’s server to the recipient’s server.

Launched in 2020, MailerSend is owned by the same company as MailerLite, the email marketing tool.

Its ambition? To make transactional email accessible to everyone, from developers and marketing teams to WordPress site owners.

To do this, MailerSend relies on several strengths:

• a visual interface to create, customize, and manage your email templates without touching a single line of code
• deliverability and performance tracking tools
• integrations with WordPress, WooCommerce, and other applications
• a free plan to try out the service
• an MCP server (Model Context Protocol), a protocol for connecting AI assistants to external tools such as MailerSend. This opens the door to more technical implementations for WordPress developers.

The platform is aimed at small businesses as well as online stores, agencies, and SaaS companies (Software as a Service, software accessible through a web browser).

What is a transactional email, and why use one?

The core of MailerSend’s service is transactional email.

Unlike a marketing email such as a WordPress newsletter, which often has a promotional goal, a transactional email is usually sent automatically following a specific action or event.

You probably receive several every week without even noticing. 

A few examples off the top of our heads:

• an order confirmation after a purchase
• a password reset link
• an account creation or verification email
• an invoice or a shipping notification
• a two-factor authentication (2FA) code
• an appointment reminder.

These messages play a key role in your relationship with your users. They deliver information people are waiting for, reassure recipients, and help your business run smoothly.

But for that to happen, they first need to reach their destination! On WordPress, by default, it’s the wp_mail() PHP function that triggers transactional emails.

Depending on your hosting configuration, it may rely on a sending system that isn’t well suited to your site’s needs.

A specialized service like MailerSend lets you hand this task over to a dedicated infrastructure, while giving you access to message tracking and authentication tools.

What’s the difference between MailerSend and MailerLite?

Before we move on, let’s clear up an important point. MailerSend and its “big brother” MailerLite belong to the same group, but they serve different purposes.

That said, don’t see them as two competitors: quite the opposite. The two tools complement each other and are designed to work hand in hand.

You can easily use MailerLite for your newsletter and MailerSend for your store’s order confirmations, for example.

Another benefit of using both: thanks to single sign-on (SSO), the two platforms let you use the same account to access their services.

To better understand what each one covers, we’ve put together a handy little summary table: 

Now that you know what MailerSend is for and what sets it apart from MailerLite, let’s explore what the tool offers for managing your transactional emails.

What are MailerSend’s main features?

MailerSend doesn’t just send transactional emails. The service is built on five main principles:

1. Flexibility.
2. Collaboration.
3. Deliverability.
4. Ease of use.
5. Effective support.

To put these commitments into practice, MailerSend organizes its features into four main categories, as detailed on its official website.

Sending and receiving messages

Sending and receiving messages is at the heart of the service. MailerSend offers an email API and an SMTP relay, with an infrastructure designed to handle anything from a few one-off emails to large volumes.

Another interesting option: inbound routing, which lets you collect recipients’ replies and automatically forward them to your application.

Handy, for example, for managing comments or support requests without juggling multiple tools.

MailerSend isn’t limited to email, either: it also lets you send SMS and WhatsApp notifications. 

Note, however: SMS is currently only available in the United States and Canada.

That said, the WhatsApp API (which you can try for free), launched in September 2026, is available internationally, provided you have a WhatsApp Business account and subscribe to the corresponding add-on.

Another interesting feature for advanced users: MailerSend offers an MCP server that lets you control some of the service’s features using artificial intelligence.

A way to simplify certain technical tasks and automate operations without having to click around the interface over and over.

Managing your account and collaborating

Once the technical side is set up, other members of your team can take over.

MailerSend lets you assign custom roles and permissions, so that each person only has access to the domains and tools they need.

Optimizing deliverability and tracking performance

To maximize the chances of your messages reaching their destination, MailerSend relies on authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (optional), as well as email address verification and blocklist monitoring tools.

In simple terms, the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols make it possible to check that an email really comes from an authorized sender and that it hasn’t been altered along the way, and to define how to handle messages that fail authentication checks.

The service also offers real-time statistics: open rates, clicks, bounces, and spam complaints.

A search engine lets you quickly find a message or a recipient to understand what happened to a given email.

Creating and customizing emails

Finally, MailerSend gives you several editors to design your transactional messages: drag and drop, HTML, and rich text.

Dynamic templates and A/B testing round out the toolkit, so you can personalize your communications and make them more effective.

On top of these features comes one last commitment from MailerSend: supporting its users, with detailed documentation and a level of support that depends on your plan.

So, are you itching to start using MailerSend? Time to get the ball rolling!

In the next section, we’ll show you step by step how to create your MailerSend account and configure your first settings.

Creating a MailerSend account: an intuitive process?

How do you create a MailerSend account?

To get started, head to the official MailerSend website. Click the “Try for free” signup button at the top right of the page: 

Next, fill out the form, which has four fields:

• company
• name
• email
• password.

If you have a Google, Apple, Microsoft, or GitHub account, you can even sign up with that account, which speeds up the process even more: 

Right after that, MailerSend asks you to name your workspace, then displays a pop-up asking you to enter your credit card details (or PayPal account) to try its “Professional” plan for 14 days.

The tool states that you won’t be charged and that at the end of the trial period, you’ll move to the free plan.

If you don’t want to share your payment details, you’ll be switched to Sandbox mode, which has stricter limits: 

It’s a minor hurdle, and in the end, signing up is still quick. 

A clean, welcoming interface

Once this is done, you land on your dashboard. First impression: MailerSend’s interface is clear, uncluttered, and rather welcoming. It immediately makes you want to keep going.

No dashboard overloaded with statistics or technical settings here. The tool first guides you through your first steps, with a well-designed onboarding path made up of three clearly identified steps:

1. Verify your email address.
2. Choose your sending method (SMTP or API).
3. Send your first email.

Just below, three shortcuts invite you to create your first email template, add your sending domain, and choose a plan.

You navigate using the sidebar menu on the left of the screen. There you’ll find MailerSend’s main features:

• domain management
• email creation
• analytics
• deliverability monitoring
• SMS and WhatsApp notifications
• developer tools.

The labels are clear enough to help you find your way around easily. We also like the quick access to help at the top right, and being able to track your email usage from the sidebar menu.

Adding and authenticating your domain

To send messages from an address like contact@mysite.com, MailerSend needs to check that you’re authorized to use the corresponding domain.

From the Email > Domains section, add your domain, then follow the instructions displayed.

Two methods are available:

1. Automatic setup, when your domain provider is compatible.
2. Manual setup, by adding the requested DNS records.

These records include SPF, DKIM, and Return-Path. They’re used to authenticate your emails and to better identify legitimate messages.

If you use WordPress, you’ll generally need to make these changes at your web host or DNS provider.

The procedure is well documented, but it can be intimidating for beginners because of several technical terms you don’t come across every day, to say the least 😉 (CNAME, SPF, DKIM, TTL, RETURN-PATH, etc.).

A record entered incorrectly can prevent your domain from being verified, and DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours, according to MailerSend.

All in all, MailerSend tries to simplify an unavoidable technical operation. Being able to automate the setup or send the instructions to a colleague (if you don’t know how to manage your DNS) is a welcome touch.

However, it would be misleading to present this setup as a formality anyone can handle in a few clicks.

Some knowledge of DNS is still useful, especially when automatic verification isn’t available.

MailerSend in practice: use cases for its main features

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter: what can you actually do with MailerSend, and what does the service bring to a WordPress site?

Sending emails with SMTP and the API

MailerSend offers two main sending methods:

1. The SMTP protocol. After you create your account, MailerSend also sets up a test domain for you to try sending emails.
2. The email API.

SMTP is generally the simplest solution for a WordPress site owner.

It lets you connect a compatible plugin to MailerSend’s sending infrastructure, without changing your site’s code.

To do this, you use the SMTP credentials generated in your MailerSend account (we’ll walk you through this below).

The email API, on the other hand, enables deeper integration into an application or website.

It’s better suited to developers who want to automate sending, use dynamic templates, or work with specific events.

Both methods share the same goal: passing messages on to MailerSend’s infrastructure, which then takes care of delivering them.

How do you connect MailerSend to WordPress and WooCommerce?

Now it’s time to put all this into practice. Let’s roll up our sleeves and connect MailerSend to WordPress.

To do this, the transactional email platform has an official plugin called MailerSend – Official SMTP Integration.

First step: install and activate it on your WordPress site, via the usual path Plugins > Add Plugin: 

Next, generate your SMTP credentials in the MailerSend interface. To do this, go to the Email > Domains menu, then click the “Manage” button: 

In the “SMTP” section, click the “Generate new user” button. Enter a username (e.g., your site’s name), then copy the automatically generated username and password.

Be sure to save them somewhere safe (or download them), as the password won’t be shown again: 

Armed with these two precious keys, head back to your WordPress dashboard and open the MailerSend SMTP settings.

Enter your username and password in the fields provided, then click the “Save” button: 

Finally, to check the connection, you can send a test email from the bottom of the settings page. 

Once setup is complete, WordPress emails that use the standard sending system can go through MailerSend.

This includes administrative notifications, password resets, and messages generated by many plugins.

For online stores, MailerSend also offers a dedicated WooCommerce plugin: MailerSend – Transactional emails for WooCommerce. It works with the service’s API and lets you replace WooCommerce’s native emails with custom templates. You can adapt order confirmations, refund notifications, invoices, and account creation messages, among others.

Creating and customizing an email with MailerSend

By nature, a transactional email isn’t exactly eye-catching. Let’s be honest: most of the time, it even looks like a dull administrative message.

To make it more appealing and pleasant for your future readers, MailerSend offers several editors to polish its look: 

• drag-and-drop editor
• rich-text editor
• HTML editor (to code your email template).

These three options are available in the Email > Templates menu: 

The most accessible is the visual drag-and-drop editor. To see what it had under the hood, we started by exploring its template library.

First pleasant surprise: the gallery is quite well stocked, with 59 templates available during our test.

They’re sorted by category (WooCommerce, e-commerce, security, notifications, onboarding), which makes searching easier.

You’ll find order confirmations, invoices, password reset emails, and welcome messages, among others.

You can also start from scratch if you’d rather create your own template.

For our test, we went with a password reset template. Once the template was selected, we were taken straight into MailerSend’s visual editor. 

The interface is divided into three areas:

1. The elements you can add, in the left menu.
2. A preview of our email, in the center.
3. The customization options, on the right.

If you want to edit your email’s text directly, a simple click on the content brings up a toolbar for adjusting its formatting (bold, italics, links, alignment, etc.).

The right-hand panel gives access to additional settings, such as text styles, colors, and spacing.

To go further and customize your message, the left menu offers various blocks to add: navigation, images, buttons, products, and dynamic content. 

A nice little extra worth noting: the template also includes dynamic variables, such as {{name}} for the recipient’s name or {{support_email}} to contact your support team. 

These variables are replaced automatically when the email is sent, provided you pass the corresponding data to MailerSend.

Our first impression? The editor is visual, well organized, and quite reassuring for a beginner.

Editing text directly in the preview is convenient, and the settings are easy to find.

If you’ve already used a WordPress page builder or a newsletter editor, you should quickly feel at home.

Above all, we like being able to start from a ready-made template instead of having to build everything ourselves.

For a simple password reset email, a few tweaks are enough to get a personalized message, without getting lost in dozens of settings.

Finally, note that A/B testing (split testing) is also available to compare different versions of an email, a handy feature for fine-tuning some of your messages.

Optimizing email deliverability

A beautiful email that never reaches its destination is a useless email. That’s why deliverability is one of MailerSend’s main selling points.

On that note, the tool also highlights a guaranteed uptime of at least 99.5% per month, as part of its SLA (Service Level Agreement), reserved for the “Starter” and “Professional” plans.

In practice, this corresponds to a theoretical maximum of 3 hours and 36 minutes of downtime over a 30-day month.

Note that this figure refers to the platform’s availability, not the percentage of emails that land in inboxes.

In fact, MailerSend’s uptime stays at 100% most of the time.

MailerSend commits to using commercially reasonable efforts to reach this goal.

To improve the delivery of your messages, the transactional email platform also offers several tools designed to limit sending issues.

Email address verification

MailerSend lets you check that email addresses are valid before you send anything to them (Email > Email verification menu).

Among other things, the tool detects syntax errors, disposable addresses, full inboxes, and certain addresses likely to cause problems.

You can import a list of addresses in CSV format for bulk verification, or use the API to check an address in real time, for example when a visitor fills in a signup form.

The benefits? Fewer emails bouncing back to the sender, a healthier sender reputation, and no sending quota wasted on invalid addresses.

DMARC monitoring

DMARC. Behind this somewhat cryptic acronym lies a security protocol designed to protect your domain name against email spoofing.

In practice, MailerSend analyzes DMARC reports to help you identify authentication problems and spot unauthorized senders using your domain (Email > DMARC monitoring menu).

Rather than having to decipher technical reports, you get an overview to better understand anomalies and take the necessary action.

Blocklist monitoring with MailerSend

Did you know that your domain or IP address can end up on a blocklist used by some email providers to filter suspicious emails?

With its blocklist monitoring tool (Email > Blocklist monitoring menu), MailerSend automatically monitors these lists and alerts you when a monitored domain or IP address appears on them.

This way, you can identify a reputation problem more quickly and take the necessary steps to request removal from the list in question.

Tracking the performance of your emails with MailerSend

MailerSend doesn’t just send emails. It also lets you track their journey.

From your dashboard (Email > Analytics menu), you can view a range of metrics, such as:

• open rate
• click rate
• spam complaints
• unsubscribes
• bounces
• sending volume.

You can also generate custom reports by choosing a specific period, then grouping the results by day, week, month, or year.

Filters by sending domain and by tags let you refine the analysis, for example to isolate your WooCommerce store’s order confirmation emails.

MailerSend goes into quite a lot of detail: you can track how opens and clicks change over time, distinguish permanent bounces (hard bounces) from temporary ones (soft bounces), and even find out which email clients and devices your recipients use.

Some results are shown as charts, others as tables.

Another welcome option: saving your reports so you can find them later and share them with authorized members of your team. You can also export them in CSV format, including an Excel-friendly version.

Managing your account and users

Besides viewing reports, your team members can also collaborate with you on your account, without sharing credentials.

From the Settings > Users menu, you can invite collaborators and assign them access rights that match their roles.

Four predefined roles are available:

• Administrator (full access)
• Manager (general access, except API and billing)
• Designer (creating and managing email templates)
• Accountant (payments and invoices).

You can also create custom roles to allow access only to certain features, domains, or templates.

If you work with several clients, that’s a real plus. Each one can access their own domains, statistics, and templates, without seeing anyone else’s.

Finally, note that the number of collaborators allowed depends on your plan. The Professional plan, for example, lets you add an unlimited number of users.

MailerSend’s integrations

Besides WordPress and WooCommerce, MailerSend has a catalog of integrations for connecting the service to other tools.

Developers can rely on official libraries for PHP, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Ruby, Java, Go, and Laravel.

The API documentation also makes it easier to build custom integrations.

For less technical users, SMTP connections and existing plugins are the most accessible solutions.

MailerSend even goes one step further with its own MCP server.

In practice, you can connect MailerSend to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or VS Code to perform certain operations directly from your AI assistant:

• sending messages
• viewing sending statistics
• creating webhooks or diagnosing sending issues.

A feature aimed more at developers and advanced users, but one that clearly shows MailerSend’s commitment to keeping pace with new AI use cases.

Support and customer service

When an important email doesn’t arrive, having clear documentation and responsive support becomes essential.

MailerSend offers a knowledge base covering ten main categories, from sending your first email to deliverability, and setting up its other flagship features (SMS, WhatsApp, etc.).

Each tutorial really goes into detail, with step-by-step explanations and screenshots to back them up. 

And if you ever need help from their support team, you have two contact channels: 

• live chat
• email support.

There’s one subtlety to be aware of, though: live chat support is only available from the Starter plan up.

The “Hobby” plan lets you contact MailerSend’s support team “only” by email.

Speaking of MailerSend’s plans, let’s take a closer look at pricing in the next section.

How much does MailerSend cost?

A free plan to get started

To start with, MailerSend offers a free plan (“Free”), but with limits on several fronts: 

• 500 emails per month
• 100 API requests per day
• a single email template
• 1 day of activity log retention
• you can’t remove the MailerSend logo from your communications (it’s included at the bottom of your emails, for example).

Even for the free plan, MailerSend asks for your payment details to activate your subscription, to prevent abuse of the platform, the company explains. You won’t be charged as long as you stay on this plan.

The 500-email allowance resets every 30 days. Before you switch to it, a 14-day trial lets you explore the features of the “Professional” plan, including a temporary domain for your first tests, without having to configure your DNS.

Paid plans to support your growth

Feeling limited by the free plan? MailerSend also offers three paid plans: 

1. “Hobby”: $6.30/month (billed yearly) for a sending limit of 5,000 emails/month.
2. “Starter”: $31.50/month for a sending limit of 50,000 emails/month and 100 SMS.
3. “Professional”: $99.00/month for a sending limit of 50,000 emails/month and 150 SMS.&nbsp

Beyond the number of emails you can send each month, the differences mainly concern usage limits (number of templates, access to support, sending domains, number of users, API limits, etc.).

Check these limits carefully against your needs before making your choice.

Also note that MailerSend offers some paid add-ons that can drive up the cost depending on your needs: 

Wondering which plan to go for? In our opinion: 

• “Hobby” is enough for a blog, a small business website, or a small WooCommerce store
• “Starter” makes sense once you manage several sites
• “Professional” is aimed primarily at agencies and companies with advanced needs.

Who is MailerSend for?

Price aside, the most important thing is to choose a plan that meets your current needs. MailerSend is flexible enough to adapt to them, even though it isn’t designed for everyone, as you’ll see below. 

Choose MailerSend if…

• you run a WooCommerce store and want your order confirmations, invoices, and customer notifications to be delivered reliably
• you’re a freelancer or run a WordPress agency and manage several sites. MailerSend can help you centralize sending, track incidents, and organize your collaborators’ access
• you’re developing an application or a SaaS service that needs to send lots of messages automatically.
  The API, webhooks, and dynamic templates will give you more options than a simple SMTP setup
• you already use MailerLite for your newsletters and want to round out your toolkit with a transactional solution.

Skip MailerSend if…

• you’re mainly looking for an email marketing tool to send newsletters, manage subscribers, and design promotional campaigns. MailerLite or an equivalent solution will be better suited
• you have a small business website that only sends a few occasional notifications. In that case, adding an external service isn’t essential.

MailerSend pros and cons

After putting MailerSend’s features and interface through their paces, here’s a table summarizing the main strengths and limitations we noted.

Our final verdict on MailerSend

So, does MailerSend live up to its promises? After testing it, we came away convinced. 

We particularly liked its clear, well-organized interface, as well as its visual editor, which makes it easy to customize a transactional email without touching a single line of code.

The wealth of features is another strength: deliverability monitoring tools, detailed statistics, customizable reports, and many integrations.

That said, not everything is perfect. In our view, being asked for payment details right at signup is a drawback.

Configuring your domain’s DNS may also put off beginners, even though MailerSend’s documentation is a real help on this front.

The restrictions of the free plan are also worth keeping in mind.

All in all, we still see more positives than negatives. MailerSend delivers on its promise: making transactional emails more accessible, without sacrificing advanced features.

Want to make up your own mind? Get started with the 14-day free trial: