I’m a big fan of plugins that do exactly what they sound like they’ll do. Stop Emails is no exception.

What’s it Do?

Stop Emails hooks into WordPress’ default email function, wp_mail() and stops all outgoing emails. Think of it as a panic button to temporary suspend all of your emails. Emails will fail silently and in the background, but you can enable an option to log all outgoing emails that were stopped.

Why would you want to do this? If your site is running into a problem and you need to stop emails quickly, it’s a good option. But probably more useful is when your testing out your site locally, and want to be able to log emails and check that they were sent without actually sending them. That’s what I’d use it for anyway.

How’s it Work?

Activate Stop Emails. Tutorial over.

Basically, the plugins begin to stop emails as soon as it’s activated. If you want to start sending emails again, simply deactivate the plugin. There is only one setting, which you can access by going to Settings -> Stop Emails. You can choose to either “Disable Logging” or “Log stopped emails to the PHP Error Log,” which can be useful for debugging purposes. By defaults, logging is switched off.

Your only setting

That’s really all there is to the plugin. It’s something to add to your developer’s toolset, and from time to time, it will be exactly what you need.

Costs, Caveats, Etc.

Stop Emails is fairly new, but I don’t imagine many features will be added to it. If you are looking for some help, or want to get in contact with the plugin developer, your best bet is the support forums on WP.org.