Fixing WordPress emails that never arrive

Contact form submissions, order confirmations, password resets and new-user notifications all disappear.

This is not a fault on your site. WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which produces a message no receiving server can verify. Gmail and Outlook drop it or file it as spam, and that is true on every host.

The fix is the same everywhere: send through a real mail provider.

1. Get an SMTP account

Any of these work and all have a free tier big enough for a normal site:

• Postmark
• Brevo
• Mailgun
• SendGrid
• Your existing mailbox provider — Google Workspace, Fastmail, Zoho — using its SMTP details

You will end up with a host, a port, a username and a password or API key.

2. Install an SMTP plugin

1. Open your Pressy and go to WordPress → Plugins.
2. Press Install a plugin and search for WP Mail SMTP or Fluent SMTP.
3. Install it, then activate it.

Full steps: installing a plugin.

3. Point it at your provider

1. Open the plugin's settings in WordPress.
2. Enter the host, port, username and password from step 1.
3. Set the From address to one at a domain you control — ideally the same domain as the site.
4. Send the test email the plugin offers.

The From address matters more than anything else here. Sending as someone@gmail.com from your own site is refused by most receivers now.

4. Authorise your domain

At your mail provider, follow its instructions to add SPF and DKIM records to your DNS. It is two or three records, and it is what takes you from "usually arrives" to "arrives".

Those records go wherever your DNS is answered — the same place the records for your domain went.

Why we do not sell you email

We deliberately do not resell mailboxes. If a host has a bad day you lose your website; if that host also holds your email, you lose the way people reach you. Buy email from someone who does it properly and connect it here.

The transactional mail we send you — provisioning, payment, suspension notices — is unaffected by any of this and goes out on our own authenticated domain.

When to write to us

Write to us if the plugin's own test email fails with a connection error rather than a rejection. Send the error text, and say which provider and port you are using.