Email Log

Email Log records what wp_mail() was asked to send: the recipient, sender, subject, headers, attachment names, content, and whether it went out. It only listens — it changes nothing about how email is sent, so it works with Adminkeep’s own SMTP feature, another SMTP plugin, or no SMTP setup at all. This page is the reference; the email log plugin page has the overview.

Turn it on

Go to Settings → Adminkeep and switch on Email Log, in the Email group. From then on, every email the site sends is written to the log the moment wp_mail() is called, before anything else happens — so an email that fails partway through still leaves a row behind.

Switching the feature off stops logging. What is already logged stays until you switch it back on, delete it, or uninstall the plugin.

The list

Tools → Email Log lists every logged email, newest first.

Columns are Subject, To, From, Status and Date, plus an Actions column with a Preview button. Screen Options, in the top-right corner, offers a show/hide checkbox for every column but Subject — Subject stays, since it opens the preview and is what a narrow screen keeps when every other column collapses.

From is hidden by default. Most of the time the recipient and the subject are enough; turn From back on from Screen Options when you need to see which address an email really went out with, useful if an SMTP plugin swaps the sender at the last moment.

Only administrators can open the log. Editors, shop managers and other roles don’t see Tools → Email Log at all.

Statuses

• Sent — the mail server accepted the email. It does not mean the email reached the inbox: the receiving server can still file it as spam or drop it silently.
• Failed — WordPress tried and got an error back. The error is kept and shown in the preview; an SMTP username or password quoted inside it is scrubbed out first.
• Unconfirmed — WordPress never heard back either way. That happens when another plugin takes over sending, or queues the email to send later. The email may still have gone out; the log just has no word on it.

Filters and search

Above the list: a status dropdown (all statuses, or one of the three above), a period dropdown (1 hour, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 7 days, 30 days, or Custom for a From/To date range), and a search box.

Search looks at the recipient, sender and subject — not the body. Filtered views live in the address bar, so a search like “failed in the last day” can be bookmarked and checked each morning.

Preview

Click a subject, or its Preview button, to open the email in a modal over the list. The top shows the status, sender, recipient, date, any Cc, Bcc and Reply-To, and attachment names — a failed email shows its error there too. ‹ and › step to the previous and next email without closing the modal.

Below that, the email itself in tabs: HTML (rendered as it was sent — labelled Plain text instead when the email has no HTML part), a separate Plain text tab shown only when the email carried both an HTML and a plain-text part, and Source (the stored body as text, markup included).

The preview is sandboxed: scripts don’t run, forms don’t work, and remote images are not loaded, since it is showing HTML that other people wrote — form submissions, plugins, order data — inside an admin screen.

Settings

• Keep the content of each email, with sign-in and password-reset links removed — on by default. Password-reset, sign-in and account-activation links are replaced with [link removed] before an email is stored; the rest of the content is kept. Untick this and the log keeps only the envelope — recipient, sender, subject, headers, attachment names and status — with no content to redact in the first place.
• Keep logs for — 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days, 1 year or 2 years. The default is 30 days. Entries past this age are deleted once a day, in batches, and the log is also trimmed to the newest 10,000 rows as email is logged, so a burst of sends can’t push it past that cap between purges.

Importing from the Email Log plugin

Already running the Email Log plugin? Adminkeep can read its table and copy the history in — sign-in links removed on the way in, the other plugin’s own log left untouched. Moving from the Email Log plugin covers what comes across, what doesn’t, and how to run the copy from the admin screen or from WP-CLI.

WP-CLI

Since 1.7.0, the log is also reachable from the command line:

wp adminkeep email-log list --status=failed --format=json
wp adminkeep email-log get 482
wp adminkeep email-log count --status=failed
wp adminkeep email-log purge --older-than=90 --yes
wp adminkeep email-log import email-log --dry-run

list takes --status=<sent|failed|unconfirmed>, --search=<text> (recipient, sender or subject), --since=<date> (UTC, e.g. 2026-09-01), --limit=<number> (default 50, at most 500), and --format=<table|json|csv|yaml|ids|count>. count takes --status only.

purge takes --all or --older-than=<days> — never both — and asks for confirmation unless you pass --yes.

import takes a source name (email-log, for the Email Log plugin) and --dry-run, which reports what would be imported without writing anything. It needs the Email Log feature switched on first, the same as the button on the screen.

list, get, count and purge work whether or not the feature is on: what was logged stays readable from the command line after logging is switched off. The full reference is Email Log in the WP-CLI docs, and wp help adminkeep email-log always matches the version you run.

Privacy

The personal-data exporter and eraser, under Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data, both cover the email log. A request for one address exports or deletes every logged email that holds it in To, From, Reply-To, Cc or Bcc — not just the rows where it is the recipient, so a stranger’s address left in a contact form’s Reply-To is covered too.

Uninstalling the plugin drops the email log table entirely, along with everything in it.