[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #60420: Default wordpress at site.com sender address can be problematic

Tue Dec 16 02:08:10 UTC 2025

#60420: Default wordpress at site.com sender address can be problematic
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 Reporter:  thinlinecz       |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Mail             |     Version:  1.5.1.2
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  close            |     Focuses:
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Comment (by dmsnell):

 Every time I dig deeper into this general topic the list of tickets
 expands the emotional heat increases 😅

 Let’s do our best to remain professional; this is a passionate topic for
 folks, and I want to stress that it will be most helpful if we stick to
 our own experience and not attempt to speak for others, whether asserting
 the motivations we assume they must have or the assumption that something
 that seems clear to us is obvious to others or even accurate.

 > WordPress can only stand with "golden rules", not with all the theories
 that help you push up your rankings or like in this case, help
 deliverability based on some "relatively well known rules"…

 I want to pause and hopefully direct the energy into what I want to see us
 all work towards: that wherever we have control, we can improve the
 ecosystem together, even when that means going beyond or in contrast to
 RFCs and other specs.

 What matters most to me is that inasmuch as we are able, that we can find
 ways to improve mail deliverability and influence each other towards more
 robust configurations and systems. Sometimes really good things come from
 solving the problem “at the wrong end of the chain of responsibility.”

 > WordPress is meant to simplify the life of the exemplary users not the
 system administrators that should have all the tools in the world to make
 things happen

 Email is collective problem and I want us to find ways to help end users
 //and// system administrators.

 > A simple canonical plugin to change the From to whatever is probably the
 best solution for those who do not make their own or use SMTP plugins

 This seems like the correct state of things, apart from the fact that
 there’s no “canonical” part, but since the plugin to workaround the issue
 is so small, I don’t know how much it would rise to the level of needing a
 canonical adoption.

 ----

 Thank you all for sharing your expertise on this, by the way. There are
 some questions I have right now after getting through this and a few other
 related tickets on the matter:

  - Do any of us we have real metrics from 6.9 to indicate if the change to
 adding a default Envelope Return-Path to `wordpress at host()` was a net help
 or hindrance for deliverability? I understand that some mail hosts are
 concerned about long-term IP reputation, but this problem has wildly
 different imperatives if we fixed 80% of mail issues and created 2% new
 problems, vs if we solved 5% of mail issues and created 60%. I made up
 those numbers. The point is without knowing these numbers it’s near-
 impossible to agree where we stand. A revert of the change could be
 warranted, but considering how all of the discussion led us a bit astray
 in the original ticket, I would like to see some substantiation for the
 claims before we overreact and removed what could be a net win, albeit
 with its own unintended consequences that still need to be worked out.

  - Do we have any tools through `.well-known` directories, DNS, or at the
 host-level which could be used to communicate into WordPress to establish
 a better Return-Path?

  - If you are a host dealing with this issue, what technically makes it
 easier to work with WordPress emails that are sent with
 `systemuser at local.system.hostname` than `wordpress at public.hostname()`?

  - If you are a host dealing with this issue, do you send all bounce
 emails to the same address for all hosted sites? Are there any potential
 privacy issues with this practice? How does receipt of bounce messages and
 DMARC notices get relayed to the site owner?

  - “I do not think WordPress should be making any attempt to test the
 deliverability of the address” @mvl22 would you care to share more about
 why? in the case that email is setup appropriately, would it be difficult
 to positively identify a proper return-path address? in which cases would
 an attempt be misleading? in other words, I would imagine that a failure
 to detect delivery might not say anything, but a confirmation of delivery
 //would//. I have no idea how to detect deliverability so maybe you are
 saying WordPress doesn’t have an avenue to do so?

 From my perspective, adding a Site Health section for email sounds like a
 high-priority task to start working towards a better future. Even if all
 we do is highlight that there is no Return-Path set, that provides the
 starting communication to direct people to where to figure this out.
 There’s a nice-looking mockup of the first step in #62129.

 ----

 Final reminders, and this is not specifically for this ticket, but based
 on discussion in this and related tickets: please refrain from suggesting
 that if people have a different perspective on this problem that they are
 ignorant of some knowledge you hold; please refrain from suggesting that
 if people were knowledgeable that they //must// agree with your ideas of
 how this ought to be; please refrain from making declarations how someone
 else feels, reacts, thinks, or works.

 We should remember that if the solutions were easy or straightforward it
 would not be likely that we would have years of attempts and debate on how
 to resolve this. Everything we do will likely make someone’s job more
 difficult; hopefully as we progress we minimize that — this is //exactly//
 why we’re discussing this, because we all want to solve this problem.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60420#comment:39>
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