⭐ Premium
Mailersend is the recommended email service for Church Admin. It handles both transactional emails (individual emails for account creation, schedule reminders, donation receipts) and bulk emails (sending to your whole congregation or a filtered group) reliably and without the sending limits that shared web hosting often imposes.
Pricing
Mailersend offers a Hobby plan costs $75.96 per year and includes 5,000 emails per month. (Brevo offers a cheaper service) Additional emails above your plan limit are charged at $1 per 1,000. You’ll need to enter card details when signing up even for the free plan, in case you go over the monthly limit.
Setup takes about 10 minutes — but allow 48 hours for account approval
Follow these steps in order. The technical DNS step (DKIM and SPF) can be done by your web host if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself — just send them the values Mailersend gives you and ask them to add them.
Step 1 — Create a Mailersend account
Go to www.mailersend.com and click Sign Up. Fill in your details on the next screen.
Step 2 — Verify your email address
Check your inbox for a verification email from Mailersend and click the Verify email address link. Once done, the first step in the Mailersend onboarding checklist will show a green tick.
Step 3 — Accept policies and add your domain
Click Start next to Please review and accept our policies, read through, and confirm. Then click Start next to Add a sending domain and enter your website domain name — without http:// or www — for example stpauls.org.uk.
Step 4 — Verify your domain (DKIM and SPF)
This is the technical step — adding DNS records to your domain so email providers like Gmail and Yahoo trust emails sent from your website. Mailersend shows you the exact records to add.
You don’t need to understand what these are — just copy the values Mailersend gives you and either add them yourself in your hosting control panel (cPanel, Cloudflare, etc.) or paste them into a support chat with your web host and ask them to add the DKIM and SPF records for you.
Once the records are added, click Verify domain. DNS changes can take a few hours to propagate — if verification doesn’t work immediately, wait an hour and try again. You can check whether the records have propagated at whatsmydns.net.
Step 5 — Get account approval
Click Get approved. Mailersend will ask a few questions about how you plan to use the service.
For the question Which services have you used in the past? select None. For the type of emails being sent, select Transactional. Once submitted you’ll see a confirmation that your application is being reviewed — approval typically takes up to 48 hours.
Step 6 — Get your API key
You don’t need to wait for approval to get your API key. Go to app.mailersend.com/integrations and click Manage in the Mailersend API section.
Click Generate a new token.
Give the token a name and set the domain field to your domain, then click Create token.
Your API token is displayed — click Download to save it and Copy to copy it to your clipboard. This is the only time the full token is shown — if you lose it you’ll need to generate a new one.
Step 7 — Add the API key to Church Admin
Go to Church Admin → Communications → Email settings. Select Mailersend as both the transactional and bulk email method, paste your API key into the Mailersend API key field, and fill in the default from email and from name. The from email must use the same domain you registered with Mailersend. Click Save.
Step 8 — Activate your plan
Once you receive the approval email from Mailersend (within 48 hours), log back in to your Mailersend account and click the Upgrade button at the top of the screen. Pull the slider to the left for the free tier (3,000 emails/month) or select the Hobby plan ($75.96/year for 5,000 emails/month). Click Subscribe now and enter your card details.
Step 9 — Set up Mailersend SMTP for WordPress emails
Church Admin uses Mailersend’s API for its own emails, but WordPress also sends some emails independently — password reset emails, for example. To route these through Mailersend too, grab the SMTP settings from your Mailersend account.
In Mailersend go to Domains and scroll down to find the SMTP credentials. In Church Admin go to Church Admin → Communications → Email settings and paste the SMTP settings into the SMTP section — or click the Use Mailersend SMTP settings button if it appears, which fills them in automatically.
Final check
Go to Church Admin → Communications → Email settings and click Send test email. If the email arrives in your inbox you’re all set. If not, check the API key is pasted correctly and that your domain has been verified in Mailersend.
If you have any other email sending plugins installed — WP Mail SMTP and similar — deactivate them. They can conflict with Church Admin’s email settings and cause unexpected behaviour.