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Plugin info

Total downloads: 417,500

Active installs: 30,000

Total reviews: 19

Average rating: 5

Support threads opened: 1

Support threads resolved: 0 (0%)

Available in: 17 language(s)

Contributors: 2

Last updated: 4/1/2025 (275 days ago)

Added to WordPress: 2/18/2014 (11 years old)

Minimum WordPress version: 5.5

Tested up to WordPress version: 6.8.3

Minimum PHP version: 5.6

Maintenance & Compatibility

Maintenance score

Stale • Last updated 275 days ago • Support resolved 0% • 19 reviews

32/100

Is Disable Emails abandoned?

Likely maintained (last update 275 days ago).

Compatibility

Requires WordPress: 5.5

Tested up to: 6.8.3

Requires PHP: 5.6

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Description

Stop a WordPress website from sending any emails using the standard wp_mail() function. No emails will be sent, not even for password resets or administrator notifications.

WordPress websites can send emails for a variety of reasons — e.g user registration, password reset, enquiry form submission, e-commerce purchase — but sometimes you don’t want it to send anything at all. Some reasons for disabling all emails:

demonstration websites that allow users to do things that normally send emails
development / test websites with live data that might email real customers
bulk-loading data into websites which might trigger emails
adding new sites into multisite installations

NB: if you need to run this plugin on WordPress 5.4 or earlier, and must install manually from a .zip file, please install version 1.6.3 which you can download from the Advanced page for the plugin. Since version 1.7.0, WordPress 5.5 or later is required.

Translations

Many thanks to the generous efforts of our translators:

Chinese (zh-CN) — Cai_Miao and the Chinese translation team
Chinese (zh-TW) — the Chinese (Taiwan) translation team
Czech (cs-CZ) — Rudolf Klusal
Dutch (nl_NL) — the Dutch translation team
English (en_CA) — the English (Canadian) translation team
English (en_GB) — the English (UK) translation team
French (fr_FR) — the French translation team
Korean (ko_KR) — the Korean translation team
Japanese (ja) — Cai_Miao and the Japanese translation team
German (de-DE) — Peter Harlacher
Norwegian: Bokmål (nb-NO) — neonnero
Norwegian: Nynorsk (nn-NO) — neonnero
Russian (ru_RU) — the Russian translation team
Swedish (sv_SE) — the Swedish translation team

If you’d like to help out by translating this plugin, please sign up for an account and dig in.

Installation

Either install automatically through the WordPress admin, or download the .zip file, unzip to a folder, and upload the folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Read Installing Plugins in the WordPress Codex for details.
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Optional: from the WordPress admin, navigate to Settings > Disable Emails and click the “Activate must-use plugin” if you want the plugin to always be activated, no matter what.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why am I still getting standard WordPress emails?

You probably have another plugin that adds its own implementation of the wp_mail() function. Try disabling some plugins.

In some circumstances, enabling the must-use plugin from settings will fix this, because must-use plugins load before other plugins.

Standard WordPress emails have stopped, but some others still get sent

You probably have a plugin that is sending emails via some other method, like directly using the PHP mail() function, or directly implementing an SMTP client. Not much I can do about that…

How does it work?

The plugin replaces the standard WordPress wp_mail() function with a function that sends no emails. Nada. Zip. Silence.

Behind the scenes, it creates a private copy of PHPMailer and allows the system to interact with it, but silently suppresses the functions that send emails. The standard WordPress filter and action hooks are supported, so plugins that register hooks for those will still function as normal. It just doesn’t actually send any emails.

Can I make it a must-use plugin?

Yes. Once you have activated the plugin, navigate to Settings > Disable Emails and click the “Activate must-use plugin”. This will create a must-use plugin (mu-plugin) that ensures that Disable Emails is always loaded. This can be especially useful on development websites where the database is frequently refreshed from a live site which does not have Disable Emails activated.

NB: if you activate the must-use plugin on a multisite, it will stop emails on all sites on the multisite! If you have multiple networks on your multisite, the must-use plugin will stop emails on all networks.

Contributions

Review feed

Ben Sibley

1/2/2017

Works great. Thanks!

Installed and it works right away.

Chad Butler

2/3/2019

Does what it says - effectively

I have used this plugin in a couple of situations. The first is when I have to spin up a development version of a live site for testing. When this is done for testing something like data import on a version of the live site's data (such as verifying certain user data), we can't have emails going out to those users. In the past, I had generally just blanked the user emails or put in a dummy email. But that doesn't allow you to do certain testing such as updating data on the user profile screen because it would trigger an email error. Using this plugin now allows me do full testing on a dev site with full user data without fear of emailing the users. The other place I have found it useful is on demo sites. As a plugin developer, there are times that I have to set up a demonstration site for a plugin. Using Disable Emails makes it possible to do that without having the demo site sending out emails. It has definitely earned a permanent place in my toolbox.

isabel104

12/20/2019

Very Useful For Development Sites

This is my go to plugin for all development sites. Very useful!

Screenshots

No screenshots available

Changelog

The full changelog can be found on GitHub. Recent entries:

1.8.2

Released 2023-11-22

fixed: deprecation warnings in PHP 8.1+