WordPress not sending email: why contact form leads and order emails go missing

WordPress not sending email usually means the site is sending, but the messages are being rejected or filtered before they reach an inbox. For a business, that is not a technical nuisance. It means contact form leads, quote requests, booking notices and WooCommerce order alerts are quietly disappearing, sometimes for months before anyone notices. It is one of the most frequently reported problems on the WordPress.org support forums, in threads about contact forms that "stopped working" and stores that stopped getting new-order emails. This guide explains why it happens, how to check whether you are losing leads today, and the fix your developer or host should put in place.

Why WordPress email goes missing

WordPress email goes missing because, out of the box, it is sent in a way that modern mailbox providers do not trust. WordPress's wp_mail() function hands each message to the web server's own mail system. Unless a plugin or setting changes it, the From address is wordpress@yourdomain.com, a mailbox that usually does not exist, sent from a server that your domain's email records do not list as an approved sender.

That used to get through. It increasingly does not. The large mailbox providers have tightened their rules:

A small business website is nowhere near 5,000 emails a day, but the "all senders" rule still applies, and unauthenticated mail from a shared web server is exactly what the filters are built to catch. The result is mail that lands in spam, or is dropped without any bounce at all.

Symptom, likely cause, fix

Ten-minute checks you can do yourself

These do not change anything on the site. Do them in order, and note what you find.

1. Submit your own form with a personal Gmail or Outlook address as the visitor's email, and a message like "test, please ignore". Note the time.
2. Look for the entry inside WordPress. Many form plugins (WPForms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms and others) keep a copy of every submission under an "Entries" menu. If your test is there, the form works and only the email is failing, which means no lead is lost yet. Contact Form 7 does not store entries by default.
3. Check spam and junk folders of the address that should receive form emails, and any shared or filtered mailbox.
4. Check the recipient in the form's settings. Look for an old employee's address, a typo, or a developer's test address. This is the cause more often than people expect.
5. For stores: go to WooCommerce, Settings, Emails, open "New order", and confirm it is enabled and the recipient is right. Forum threads like this one show this is the first thing support teams ask.
6. Ask: did anything change? A new host, a move to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a new domain, or DNS edited by someone. Email often breaks weeks after a change, when cached records expire.

If entries are being saved but not emailed, export them now and contact those people. The "form creating entry but not sending email" pattern is common, and those entries are leads you still have.

The fix: authenticated sending and three DNS records

The fix that lasts has two parts: send through a real, authenticated mail account, and publish DNS records that prove the site is allowed to send for your domain.

Part 1: send through SMTP or an email service

An SMTP plugin makes WordPress log in to a proper mail server to send, instead of using the web server's own mail. That server can be your business mail provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), your host's authenticated mail, or a transactional email service built for website mail. Set it up so that:

• The From address is on your own domain, for example website@yourcompany.com. Never use the visitor's address as the From address; that is what spoofing looks like to a filter.
• The visitor's address goes in Reply-To, so you can still click Reply.
• The SMTP password or API key is stored in wp-config.php or the plugin's encrypted setting, not shared in an email.

Part 2: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Whoever manages your DNS adds these records. If you do not know who that is, our guide to taking back your site from a former developer shows how to find out.

For your developer or host: diagnose it properly

Work from the outside in: what the DNS says, whether WordPress hands the message over, and what the receiving server decided.

1. Read the DNS

# who receives mail for the domain
dig +short MX example.com

# SPF: there must be exactly one record starting v=spf1
dig +short TXT example.com | grep -i spf

# DMARC policy
dig +short TXT _dmarc.example.com

# DKIM: the selector depends on the provider (google, selector1, s1, k1...)
dig +short TXT google._domainkey.example.com

2. Does WordPress hand the message over?

wp eval 'var_dump( wp_mail( "you@example.com", "Test from WordPress", "If this arrives, sending works." ) );'

bool(true) only means PHPMailer accepted the message for sending. It says nothing about delivery. bool(false) means it failed inside WordPress, and the reason is passed to the wp_mail_failed action. To capture it, drop a small must-use plugin into wp-content/mu-plugins/log-mail-failures.php:

<?php
// Log the reason whenever wp_mail() fails. Remove when finished.
add_action( 'wp_mail_failed', function ( $error ) {
    error_log( 'wp_mail_failed: ' . $error->get_error_message() );
} );

3. What did the receiving server decide?

When a test does arrive, even in spam, open the full headers ("Show original" in Gmail) and find the Authentication-Results line. It shows spf=, dkim= and dmarc= as pass or fail, and that tells you which record to fix. If nothing arrives at all, ask the host for the outgoing mail log for your test's timestamp; it will show a rejection message such as Microsoft's 550 5.7.515.

4. The "same domain" trap

If the website and your mailboxes share a domain but the mailboxes are hosted elsewhere (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), a cPanel-style server can wrongly deliver mail for that domain to itself. In cPanel this is the Email Routing setting; set it to "Remote Mail Exchanger". Other control panels have an equivalent "disable local mail for this domain" option.

5. WooCommerce specifics

# is the New Order email enabled, and to whom does it go?
wp option get woocommerce_new_order_settings --format=json

If the store is busy, also look at WooCommerce, Status, Scheduled Actions and filter by Pending: a large backlog of stuck background jobs can delay some emails. WooCommerce also writes logs under WooCommerce, Status, Logs, and a mail logging plugin shows whether each order email was generated. If the log says the email was sent and it never arrived, the problem is delivery, not WooCommerce.

What missing emails do NOT mean

Make sure you never lose a lead to email again

1. Store every submission in WordPress, not only in email. Use a form plugin that saves entries, or add an entries add-on.
2. Send notifications to two addresses, for example the owner and a shared sales inbox.
3. Send yourself a test every month, and after any change to hosting, DNS or email provider.
4. Keep the From address fixed on your own domain, and the visitor in Reply-To.
5. Watch DMARC reports for a few weeks after setup. They show every service sending as your domain, including ones nobody remembered.

Our guide to adding a contact form to WordPress covers choosing a form plugin that stores entries.

When to hand it over, and what to gather first

Hand it over when you do not know who manages your DNS, when the site takes orders or bookings, or when the basic checks above did not find it. Gather this first:

• The address of every form that matters, and where its emails should go.
• Your email provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, the host, other) and an admin who can add DKIM.
• Who manages DNS: the registrar, the host, or a service such as Cloudflare, and a login.
• Hosting and WordPress administrator logins.
• The time of a test submission that did not arrive.
• Whether anything changed recently: host, domain, email provider.