APPideas Email Holinator

APPideas Email Holinator stops this site sending email, and records the messages it
held so you can see exactly what would have gone out.

The two switches that matter — Block emails and Log emails — are pinned to
the admin toolbar, one hover away from every screen in wp-admin. The toolbar icon
turns orange while mail is being logged and red while it is being held, so you can
tell at a glance what the site is doing with its email.

It adds one wp-admin screen and that toolbar item, and nothing else: no
public-facing frontend, no dashboard widgets, and no changes to the body of any
other admin page.

Holding

• Block emails holds everything that goes out through wp_mail(), before it reaches any mail transport — WordPress’s own, or an SMTP plugin’s.
• On WordPress’s own mail path a held message is answered as sent, so a held password reset or order confirmation does not turn into an error message on a site that was never meant to send it.
• Two constants for wp-config.php, AIEH_PERMAHOLE and AIEH_PERMALOG, force a switch on and lock it in the toolbar — for a development site seeded from production data, where forgetting once is once too many.

The log

• Log emails records every message sent through wp_mail() — sender, recipients, subject and body — held or not, and the Holinator screen lists them newest first with search, sort and a CSV download.
• Open a message to read it the way it would have arrived, with an HTML body rendered in a sandbox; resend it exactly as it was sent, or open a print-friendly view.
• A message the mail transport rejected is recorded as failed, with the transport’s own error, and the log keeps the newest 1,000 messages.

Tools

• A status card shows what the two switches are doing right now, and updates the moment a switch is flipped in the toolbar.
• Send a real test message through the current settings and read a step-by-step transcript of what happened to it.

External services

This plugin contacts no external service. Nothing is sent to APPideas or to any third
party, and there is no analytics, telemetry, licence check, or update service of any
kind.

APPideas Email Holinator PRO adds

• An allow list — the accounts and roles you name still get their mail while everything else stays held.
• A block list — mail goes out as usual, and only the accounts and roles you name are held.
• Forwarding — messages that match are redirected to one address you can read, and the log records where each one actually went.
• Rules are written against the WordPress users and roles you already manage, and act on messages with a single recipient.

PRO installs alongside this plugin rather than replacing it, and adds its controls to
the Tools tab of this plugin’s own screen. See https://appideas.com/email-holinator/

Test Analysis

Suite
Metric
v 1.3.2

PHP (PHPUnit)
Line coverage
99.36 %

PHP (PHPUnit)
Tests
304

JavaScript (Jest)
Statement coverage
98.48 %

JavaScript (Jest)
Branch coverage
93.06 %

JavaScript (Jest)
Tests
315

End-to-end (Playwright)
Tests
203

Version 1.3.2 lints clean — zero errors, zero warnings, and zero suppressions — against
WordPress Coding Standards 3.4.1 on PHP_CodeSniffer 3.13.5, PHPCompatibilityWP 2.1.8
checked from PHP 7.4 upward, and @wordpress/eslint-plugin 22.22.0 on ESLint 8.57.1. Plugin
Check 2.1.0 reports no errors against the shipped files, across every check category; its
26 warnings are the direct-database-query notices on the one file that owns the log table
and two for reading WordPress’s own mail filters, each reviewed and kept on purpose.