WordPress.com has a built-in email delivery system for contact forms, subscribers, blog posts, and notifications from plugins like WooCommerce. In this guide, we’ll cover common reasons why you or your visitors might not receive those notifications.
In this guide
Sometimes, the simplest explanation is often the correct one! Here are some of the most common reasons you may not receive an email — we recommend you check these first.
Even if you’ve received messages in your inbox before, email spam rules are constantly evolving to combat new spam behavior. It’s always a good idea to check your spam or junk folder first and foremost.
Some email providers like Gmail automatically filter messages into promotional or social folders. Check those folders as well if you have them.
By default, messages are sent to the email address you signed up with — you can view this email address in your account settings. However, it’s possible that the email you’re looking for was sent to a different address. This can happen in several situations including:
- Contact form messages: contact forms can be set to deliver notifications to a different email address.
- Domain notifications: the registered contact email for a domain can be different from your account’s email address.
- Plugin emails: emails sent by plugins for various functions on your site can be sent to and from different email addresses.
If you have an email address that uses your domain (such as those provided by Professional Email or Google Workspace), can you send and receive emails normally with that address? If not, make sure your subscription is up to date and the necessary DNS records are present on your domain for your email to function.
Depending on the type of email and how it’s sent, the email may not arrive instantly. It can take up to 30 minutes for emails to arrive so check back later for the email you’re waiting for.
If you have a contact form on your website but did not receive an email notification when someone sent you a message through the form, take the following steps:
- Visit your website’s dashboard.
- Click on Feedback → Form Responses to view all messages submitted via your site’s forms.
- Check for the message you’re looking for under the “All” and “Spam” tabs. (The spam tab will only appear if your site has received spam submissions.)
- If the message you’re looking for appears under ‘All,’ your visitor successfully submitted the form even though you didn’t receive an email notification. Assuming you have already checked the basics, we recommend that you try changing the email address to which the form is sent. For example, if you’re using a Yahoo email address, test a Gmail address to see if future emails arrive.
- If the message you’re looking for appears under ‘Spam,’ select the “Not spam” option for that message. This will train the spam filters to better recognize this type of message in the future.
- If the message you’re looking for does not appear anywhere, your visitor did not successfully submit the form.
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If you’re using a third-party plugin to collect form responses, they will not show in Feedback. Instead, the third-party provider may include their own log of the sent form submissions.
Do you have a subscriber who has told you they’re not receiving email notifications when you publish a new blog post? This can typically be resolved in one of the following ways:
First, make sure the post is eligible for an email notification. A new post notification is sent when a blog post is publicly published (or scheduled to be published). A notification is not sent when:
- A previously published blog post is re-published.
- A blog post is moved from private to public.
- A previously published blog post is updated.
- Your site was set to private when the post was published.
- A page, instead of a blog post, is published.
If your subscriber should have received an email but reports that they didn’t, you can check to make sure they are, in fact, subscribed to your posts. To check if someone is on your subscriber list:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- On the left side, navigate to Users → Subscribers (or Hosting → Subscribers if using WP-Admin).
- Search for their email address in the list of subscribers.
If they are subscribed, ask your subscriber to check the following:
- Have them check the basics, like their spam folder and the correct email address.
- Ask them to visit subscribe.wordpress.com and check the email frequency they have set for notifications from your site:
- The “email me new posts” option should be enabled.
- The delivery frequency must be set to “Instantly” for the email to arrive immediately. If set to “Daily” or “Weekly,” ask your subscriber to wait 24 hours or 7 days as appropriate.
Ask your other subscribers if they received the email notification of a new blog post. This will let you know if the issue is specific to a single subscriber or if there’s more you need to investigate. Check for common themes if there’s more than one subscriber who is missing an email. Are they all using the same email provider? Do they show up under Subscribers? Have they confirmed their subscription delivery preferences?
Many plugins send emails through your site. If these emails are not arriving to the intended recipient, we recommend the following solutions:
To ensure email delivery, emails sent out by plugins on your site should be sent from email addresses that match the primary domain name of your site.
For example, if your primary domain name is yourgroovydomain.com, you would want a plugin to send order notifications from an @yourgroovydomain.com email address, not a @gmail or @yahoo address which are often blocks.
Check our Add Email to Your Domain guide for options to create a domain email address. Refer to the plugin’s documentation to learn how to configure the plugin to send emails from your domain email address.
Install an email logging plugin such as WP Logging. These third-party plugins can log all of the messages sent through the system and give you more information as to why emails may not be sent or delivered correctly.
Some plugins can intefere with each other. The more plugins installed on your site, the more likely a conflict can occur.
To check for plugin conflicts, temporarily deactivate all plugins on your site then reactivate them one at a time, checking each time which one causes the issue to appear. Visit our Solve Problems With Plugins guide for step-by-step instructions.
Most plugins are developed by third parties, so if you continue to experience issues with email deliverability in those plugins be sure to reach out to the plugin developer.
You can install and set up an SMTP plugin to replace the default email system with your own server. You can learn more about Email and SMTP plugins in this guide. Take care to follow the setup instructions carefully, because a misconfigured SMTP plugin is a common source of email delivery issues.
WooCommerce emails include registration, order confirmation, order status updates, and more. Visit the Email FAQ guide from WooCommerce for more detailed information about emails sent by WooCommerce.
If emails are not arriving for you or your customers, first check to make sure you have set up a specific email to be sent out:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings.
- Click on the “Emails” tab to view a list of all email notifications sent from WooCommerce.
- Click “Manage” next to the email that you expect to have been sent out.
- Ensure the box next to “Enable this email notification” is checked.
- If available for that email type, make sure the “Recipient(s)” field has a valid email address.
Just like with other plugins, it’s recommended to use a domain email address with WooCommerce:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings.
- Click on the “Emails” tab.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the screen, below the list of emails, to the “Email sender options” section.
- Replace the “From” address with an email address that uses your domain:
If you continue to experience issues with WooCommerce email deliverability, we recommend logging outgoing emails, checking for plugin conflicts, and if the issue persists, using an SMTP plugin.
