Guides/Troubleshooting/Troubleshoot notification email delivery issues

Troubleshoot notification email delivery issues

WordPress.com has a built-in email delivery system for contact forms, subscribers, and blog posts. In this guide, we’ll cover common reasons why you or your visitors might not receive those notifications.

Most common email issues

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.

Check your spam folder

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.

Check the correct email address

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:

Verify your email address is working

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.

Wait 30 minutes

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.

Check if emails are blocked

If an email logging plugin confirms that no emails are being sent from your site, your site may be temporarily blocked from sending emails to prevent against spam or abuse. Review our guide on how to remove a block on site emails.

Contact form emails

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:

  1. Visit your website’s dashboard.
  2. Click on FeedbackForm Responses to view all messages submitted via your site’s forms.
  3. 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.

📌

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.

Notifications to subscribers

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:

Check an email was sent

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.

Check your subscriber list

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:

  1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
  2. On the left side, navigate to Jetpack → Subscribers.
  3. Search for their email address in the list of subscribers.

Ask your reader to check their subscription

If they are subscribed, ask your subscriber to check the following:

  1. Have them check the basics, like their spam folder and the correct email address.
  2. 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.
The "email new posts" setting is enabled and set to "instantly".

Look for other patterns

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?

Was this guide helpful for you?

Not quite what you're looking for? Get Help!

Copied to clipboard!