How to Send a Quick Email with WordPress from the WordPress Admin including Attachment

Send a Quick Email with WordPress

Have you ever wanted to send a quick email from the WordPress dashboard? After all, you can configure WordPress to send an email when a comment is posted, so you should be able to send an email upon request as well! Well, with the Quick Mail WordPress plugin you can do just that.

Quick Mail, developed by Mitchell D. Miller adds a menu item to WordPress Tools which allows you to send an email plus one optional attachment.

Quick Mail

There are no options to setup. All you need to send an email is the user’s name and email address. If required you can attach one file to message, but this is optional. For convenience, the program saves the message in a form so repeat messages can be sent.

Quick Mail sends emails as ‘plain-text’, including URLs. Any HTML content can be included as a file attachment.

• The plugin uses WordPress’s wp_mail function which in turn uses PHPMailer (PHP sendmail) to send mail.
• As you should never trust user input, the email content is sanitized using the sanitize_text_field

User Permissions

For security purposes Quick Mail’s usage is limited to users who have the capability to publish posts. Those who do not have the necessary permissions will not see Quick Mail as an option in the Tools Menu.

Quick Mail Versions

At the time of writing, Mitchell says Quick Mail has been tested with WordPress 4.0.1, PHP 5.4, and 5.5. There are no PHP errors or warnings with WP_DEBUG turned on. Though this will obviously change with future versions of WordPress and Quick Mail.

Send a Quick Email with WordPress Conclusion

I tested the plugin and found it works as advertised, but, as you don’t have an address book, you need to know the email address of you’re recipient. Maybe Mitchell could consider adding an address book ability in future versions.

Overall the plugin does what is says on the tin and is a simple way to send a quick email with an attachment from the WordPress dashboard.

• BTW, Mitchell named this plugin “Quick Mail” instead of “Quick Email,” because “Quick Mail” is shorter in Spanish.

Finally, if you have any thoughts or suggestions relating to this article, don’t forget to let me have them in the comment box below. Thanks for dropping by.