a common problem among website owners is that wordpress doesn’t send emails properly or doesn’t send them at all.
Most managed wordpress hosting providers, including kinsta, do not offer email hosting. however, that doesn’t mean you can’t send emails from your wordpress installation. At Kinsta, all sites are equipped with transactional email support, which means your wordpress site will be able to send notifications, woocommerce order confirmations, and other types of site related emails.
Usually, when you try to fix wordpress not sending emails, it is not a problem on the server, but rather the email is incorrectly configured in the wordpress installation or there is an incompatibility.
In this post, we’ll show you how to identify why wordpress isn’t sending emails to you or your users, and show you how to fix it. Whether you’re running a regular wordpress site or a woocommerce store, we’ll show you how to get emails working again.
We’ll also look at some of the most popular contact form plugins and identify exactly why each of them might be having trouble sending emails.
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why won’t wordpress send email
there are a few reasons why you might have problems with wordpress not sending emails. these include:
Let’s see how you can identify which of these might be causing the problem.
1. emails are sent but go to spam
Before doing any other tests, please make sure that wordpress emails are not converted to spam.
If a user tells you that wordpress isn’t sending emails, it could just be that their emails are going to be sent as spam.
Have them check their spam folder for emails from the system. some email clients may identify wordpress emails as spam because they are automated.
2. your server is not configured correctly
a common reason why wordpress doesn’t send emails is that your server is not configured to send them.
web servers are not designed to send email and your server may not be configured to use the php mail() function.
The good news is that you can easily check if this is what is causing the problem and you can fix it.
how to test if the server is sending email
The first thing you can do is run a test on your wordpress site with the free email verification plugin.
this is a basic plugin designed to test if your wordpress installation and/or server can send emails.
once installed, go to tools > check the email in your wordpress dashboard. enter an email address to send a test and click send test email.
You will then see a confirmation.
Check your email client to see if you received the test email. The subject line will appear as “Test email from https://yourdomain.com.”
Also, make sure to check your spam or junk mail folder. If you received an email, it means that WordPress can send emails just fine on your web server.
If you’re still not receiving emails, it’s most likely a misconfiguration with your contact form plugin or an incompatibility. you can always contact the plugin developer for help. let them know that you ran the above test and email is working on your wordpress installation. or follow the steps below for some of the more polar contact form plugins.
if you are a kinsta customer and using hhvm, you can temporarily switch to php 7 to test if there is a compatibility issue. you can easily switch to php 7 within your mykinsta dashboard. after the test, you can switch back to hhvm.
For both kinsta clients and those with other hosts, if you experience connection issues you may also need to try an alternate port. your host might be blocking the port.
kinsta uses google’s cloud platform which by default blocks outgoing connections on port 25. according to google “this outgoing smtp port is blocked due to the large amount of abuse this port is susceptible to.” port”. in this case try an alternate port like 2525. ports 587 and 465 are open in kinsta.
3. your contact form plugin is sending fake emails
If you ran the above test and your server is configured to send emails, it means there is a problem with the plugin sending emails from your wordpress site.
most likely a contact form plugin.
Contact form plugins send emails that are sometimes identified as fake emails by email clients. these are similar to spam emails: email clients will mark them as suspicious.
The reason contact form emails sometimes look spoofed is that they are sent from a different address than the one added to the from: field in the email you received. receives.
so if you configured your contact form to populate the from: field with the email address of the person completing the form, but the email actually came from your wordpress site , then your email client will be suspicious of the email and might mark it as false.
You can also have problems if emails are sent to and from the same email address. so if your forms plugin sends emails from your admin email address (which it will by default) and you also have it configured to send to that address, some email providers may not like. this is less likely to be a problem than the “spoof” email problem.
For contact forms, the recipient of the notification email will normally be you. this means you can change the settings in your contact form plugin to fix this problem, and you can easily test if the emails are received.
affected contact form plugins
Any contact form plugin can be affected by this issue. Here are some of the plugins you might have this problem with:
- contact form 7
- gravity forms
- ninja forms
- happy form
- forms
- jetpack contact form
- formidable forms
I’ll show you how to fix the emails not sending issue for each of your contact forms shortly. First, let’s take a look at how to fix wordpress not sending email for each of the causes we’ve identified.
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how to prevent wordpress emails from becoming spam
1. whitelist email address
If the email is going to become spam, you can ask your users to whitelist their emails by adding their email address to their contacts.
In gmail, if they move the email to inbox, that should mean emails from that address won’t be moved to spam in the future, but adding the address to contacts will also be safer.
2. use a more secure email address
You may also want to review the email address your site sends emails from. By default, this will be your admin email address. if it’s [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] or something similar, then email providers might be assuming it’s spam.
Try changing the email address to something more professional looking and make sure all emails sent to that address are forwarded to your normal address so you don’t miss any responses. you can do this by creating an alias for your email address.
3. configure email authentication
another reason your wordpress emails may be sent as spam is because your domain name has not been properly authenticated for email.
follow our email authentication guide to make sure it works correctly.
how to configure smtp in wordpress to send email
If you ran the above email test and emails are not being sent from your site, then you need to use an external smtp provider and link it to your site to send emails again.
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smtp stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. moves emails in and across networks. so if your server is not configured to send emails, it will do it.
There are a number of smtp providers to choose from, including a selection of free providers (such as gmail’s smtp server) – so this doesn’t have to cost you any money, just a little time.
To set this up, follow our guide to using a free smtp server with wordpress.
how to configure your forms plugin to send email correctly
If your server is configured to send emails but you’re still having problems with form inputs not being sent, it probably means you need to modify your form settings.
Let’s take a look at what you need to do for each of the most popular form plugins to get those emails sent again.
For each of these, I’m assuming you’ve tried adding smtp to your site, or your server is already sending emails (and you’ve checked your spam folder), but the emails still haven’t arrived.
fix contact form 7 not sending emails
contact form 7 is one of the oldest and most popular free wordpress form plugins.
If you’re having trouble sending emails (and you know your server is sending emails), the solution is to change the address that emails are sent from.
in your wordpress admin, go to contact > contact forms.
Select the form you’ve created and open the Mail tab.
Make sure the From field has the admin email address of your site, not the email address input in the form. You can use that in the Reply to field but not the From field.
Avoid using the same email addresses for the from and to fields. use a different email address than the one you use for your site.
save your changes.
now try things out by filling out the form yourself.
fix gravity forms not sending emails
gravity forms is one of the most popular and respected premium form plugins. you’re less likely to run into problems with emails not being sent from this plugin than with contact form 7, but it does happen. You will find detailed instructions in the plugin documentation.
Work through the options in the documentation in order until things are working again.
fix ninja forms not sending emails
ninja forms has free and premium versions. there are also many additional plugins for you that you can download for free from the wordpress repository.
if you have problems related to emails with ninja forms, the recommended solution is to use the sendwp plugin, developed by the same team.
SendWP is designed to get SMTP working on your server – which you can also do using free plugins. And if the problem isn’t to do with your server not sending email, SendWP won’t fix it.
then if you don’t want to pay the $9/month for sendwp, try following the email troubleshooting guide in their documentation.
fix happy forms not sending emails
happyforms is another plugin with a free and premium version.
HappyForms has a help guide but this doesn’t go into detail on what to do if its emails aren’t sending.
To change the email address that happy forms are sent from, you can edit the email settings for an individual form, similar to Contact Form 7.
go to happy forms > all forms and select the form you want to edit. this will bring up an interface that looks like the customizer.
opens the email tab.
Here you can customize the To and From addresses for notifications and confirmations to make sure you aren’t sending spoof emails.
Once you’ve made your changes, click the update button at the top and test your form.
fix web forms not sending emails
weforms is another forms plugin with free and premium versions. allows you to configure the plugin to use email with a selection of email providers, including wordpress itself, sendgrid, or others.
has a troubleshooting guide to help you fix web forms not sending email issue. Follow the guide to identify the source of the problem and get your emails working again.
fix jetpack contact form not sending emails
If you’re running the jetpack plugin, you may be using the basic contact form that comes with it. you do this by adding a form block to a page or post in wordpress.
jetpack doesn’t have as many configuration options as dedicated form plugins, but you can change the address that emails are sent to.
Because jetpack doesn’t use a form field in the to or from field of the email, you’re less likely to run into email-related issues. if you have problems, it will be because you are sending emails to and from the same address.
Once you’ve added the form, click the edit icon above and a dropdown menu will appear. use this to change the address forms are sent to.
If you want to change the address forms are sent from, you’ll have to change the admin email address for your website, as that’s what the Jetpack form uses.
fix awesome forms not sending emails
formidable forms is another form plugin with a free and premium version. If you’re having trouble sending email from your contact forms in great ways, the official documentation recommends adding smtp to your site.
but what if you already did and things still don’t work? well, again your emails are likely to be marked as “fake” emails because they are sent from an address that is not the actual shipping address.
in the wordpress admin, go to formidable > forms and then select the form you want to edit. click the settings tab at the top and then actions & notifications tab on the side. from here, open the email notification metabox.
Here you can edit the address that notification emails are sent from and to. By default, it will use the admin email address for both and not an email address taken from the form.
To change the address that emails are sent to (so it’s not the same address they’re sent from), edit the to field and manually enter the email address you want to use.
The configuration screen will save your changes as you make them, so be sure to check that what you enter is correct.
summary
sometimes wordpress won’t send emails and you might have a hard time figuring out why. This issue, which is one of the most common wordpress errors, can be caused by emails being sent as spam, your server not configured to send emails, or your contact form settings need to be changed.
Follow the guide above to diagnose why your wordpress site is not sending emails and fix the problem. you should have emails working properly very soon!