Restore a live database onto a test site and WordPress starts mailing real customers — password resets, order confirmations, renewals. Email Holinator holds every message wp_mail() sends, and keeps a readable copy of each one.
One switch holds every message the site tries to send. Turn it on before you import the database, not after.
Every held message is kept whole — recipients, subject, the rendered body, and the name of anything attached — so you can see exactly what would have gone out, and send it on if you decide it should.
Two constants in wp-config.php force the switch on and take it out of every administrator’s reach, including yours. While it is running, nothing inside WordPress can lift the hold — not the toolbar, not an administrator, not the REST API.
The switch lives in the toolbar, on every admin page, so it is one click from wherever you already are. It catches what WordPress sends through wp_mail() — core’s own mailer and the SMTP plugins that hook it, not just the default one.
Every message is kept whole and opened in place: recipients, subject, the body itself, and the names of anything attached. Search by recipient or subject, export the list, or send a stored message on once you have decided it should go.
The switch a person can turn off is the switch someone turns off. Two constants in wp-config.php force it on and lock it out of the admin screen entirely — the toolbar control renders disabled and nothing sent through the settings route can move it. Put them in the staging site’s config once and stop thinking about it.
// wp-config.php on the staging site.
// Hold everything WordPress sends, and log it.
define( 'AIEH_PERMAHOLE', true );
define( 'AIEH_PERMALOG', true );PRO adds exceptions to the switch. Name the accounts and roles that should still receive their mail — you, and whoever else is testing — and everything else stays held. Rules are built by searching WordPress users and roles, so a rule naming the Administrator role keeps working when the team changes.
Instead of holding what matches, redirect it to a single address. The log records the address the message actually went to rather than the one it was addressed to, so the trail matches what happened.
The whole holding-and-logging product. Not a trial, and nothing expires.
On WordPress.org
Everything in Free, plus:
Adds to your free install
Everything that goes out through WordPress’s own wp_mail() — the function core itself uses for password resets and new-user notices. That covers the SMTP plugins that replace it too, not just the default mailer. What it cannot see is a plugin that calls PHP’s mail() directly or opens its own connection to a mail service, because that message never passes through WordPress at all. Bypassing wp_mail() costs a plugin compatibility with every SMTP plugin its users install — but the gap is real, and worth knowing about rather than discovering.
No, and mostly you should not want it there. It is built for the copies — staging, a local checkout, the clone you made to test an upgrade. Those are the sites that hold a real customer list and no reason to email it.
Yes. PRO adds to it rather than replacing it, and will not activate on its own. It adds no admin screen either — everything it brings appears inside the free plugin’s own Tools tab.
Every site you run. One licence, no per-site pricing.
The site gets quieter, never louder. The allow and forward rules stop overriding and the site falls back to holding everything, exactly as the free plugin does. A block list keeps holding. A billing problem can never make a site send something you had stopped.
Nothing ever leaves your site. No third party, no phone-home, no update check, no telemetry — the free plugin reads the mail WordPress was already sending and writes it to one table.