Hosting wordpress on bluehost has been nice except for one problem. All notifications from my wordpress come out weird. The domain name of the sender does not show up as my domain name. It shows up as username@box###.BlueHost.com as explained here.

I had figured out a way to fix this by editing some core wordpress scripts and had shared my method in a previous post. It was working out fine, except for one small problem.. Every time wordpress got updated, I would loose my fix and I would have to make those changes again.

I then found out, I could use filters to over-ride two variable wp_mail_from and wp_mail_from_name which would do exactly what I wanted. I then did some digging to understand how wordpress plugins work to write my own plugin. I also wanted the ability to have my own plugin settings page, just so I can set the email address and name and have it saved in the internal wordpress database instead of having it hard coded in the plugin. These two excellent tutorials on plugins helped me a lot - here and here.

Thus was born the plugin email-over-rider. Just download the zip and upload the plugin and activate it. Then go to the Settings area in your wordpress admin section and you should see the Email Over-rider sub menu. Just set the required email address and Name and you are set. No need to update the wordpress code everytime wordpress gets updated.

If plugins are not your cup of tea, you could also just add the filters to your themes functions.php file. The entire method is explained very nicely here.