I'm not getting form notification emails

Someone fills in your contact form, but you never get the email notification. This is more common than you might think, and the cause is almost always an email delivery issue or a notification setting rather than a broken form.

Troubleshooter

Where are your form emails going?

Is the notification in your spam, junk or promotions folder?

Step 1: Check your spam folder

Email from websites often gets flagged as spam because spam filters don't always trust the way it's sent.

Open your email inbox and look in the spam, junk, or promotions folder. In Gmail, Spam sits under More in the left-hand menu, and Promotions is one of the inbox categories. You only have it if your inbox type is set to Default.

Search for the address the notifications come from. That depends on your platform (see the list below). On WordPress, it's often something like noreply@yoursite.com, or wordpress@yoursite.com, which is the address WordPress itself uses when nothing else is set.

If you find it in spam, mark it as not spam (in Gmail, open Spam, tick the box next to the message, then click Not spam at the top) or add the sender address to your contacts. This trains your email service to trust future messages.

Where the notifications come from on each platform:

Squarespace: form-submission@squarespace.info.
Webflow: no-reply@webflow.com, no-reply@webforms.io and no-reply-forms@webflow.com. Add all three to your safe senders.
Wix: look for emails from notifications@wix-forms.com, no-reply@wixsiteautomations.com or reply-to@wixforms.com. Wix also asks you to allow *@automations.ascendbywix.com, *@crm.wix.com, *@wixforms.com and no-reply@test.wixshoutout.com, then republish the site.
Shopify: the built-in contact form sends to your store's sender email address. Submissions flagged as spam arrive with [SPAM] at the start of the subject, so check any filter that sets those aside.
Custom-coded: ask your developer which address and service send the notifications.

Step 2: Confirm submissions are being stored

Check whether the form submissions are at least being saved, even if the email isn't arriving.

Log in to your WordPress dashboard.

Open your form plugin (WPForms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, etc.) from the left menu.

Check "Entries" or "Submissions." If your test submission is there, the form itself is working, only the email delivery is failing. An empty list isn't proof the form failed, because some plugins never store submissions (see the questions below).

Submissions are recorded? Good.

You haven't lost any submissions. You can view them where your platform stores them. Now the email delivery needs fixing so you receive notifications going forward.

Step 3: Understand why this happens

Why notifications go missing depends on who sends the email.

On WordPress, your own web server sends it. Most web servers are not set up to send email reliably on their own. Without a proper email-sending service (called an SMTP service, after Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: the industry standard for sending email), notifications often:

Get blocked silently by the server
Arrive in spam because the server isn't trusted by email providers
Fail to send at all after a server update

The fix is to connect your site to a dedicated email-sending service. This is a one-time setup that we handle for WordPress sites.

Both paths reach the same mail server. The difference is what the email is carrying when it gets there, and that is what decides which folder it lands in.

Read this as text

Your website sends email on its own: contact form notifications, order confirmations, password resets. Where that email goes next depends on one setting.

With SMTP configured, the site logs in to a real mail service using a username, password and server address. That service signs the message and keeps delivery logs, then passes it to the recipient’s mail server. Because the message is authenticated and the sending service has its own reputation, it normally lands in the inbox.

Without it, the site falls back to a basic server function called PHP mail. The message goes to the same recipient server, but with no authentication signature, no delivery log, and a sending reputation shared with every other site on that server, so if any of them sends spam, yours is doubted too. Some hosts block it outright.

Same sender, same recipient, same destination server. The only difference is what the email can prove about itself on arrival, and that is what decides the folder.

On Squarespace, Webflow and Wix, the platform sends the notification from its own addresses (see Step 1). The fixes Webflow and Wix give are about your inbox and the form's settings:

Webflow says shared addresses like info@ are more likely to be filtered as spam, so a named address (like jane@) is more reliable.
Wix says that if the sender and recipient email are the same, you should change the recipient email, because some email providers treat these messages as spam.

On Squarespace, check your plan too. Squarespace doesn't send form submission emails from trial sites, unless the site owner is a Squarespace Circle member. Until the site is on a paid plan, connect Google Drive or Mailchimp to collect submissions.

On Shopify, if your sender email is on your own domain and you didn't buy that domain through Shopify, Shopify says you might also need to authenticate the domain. See Email notification problems.

On a custom-coded site, your developer chose how email is sent. Ask them to check it.

Step 4: Check the notification email address

The email notifications may be set to go to the wrong address.

Log in to your WordPress dashboard and open your form plugin.

Find the notification settings for the form. This is usually under "Settings" or "Notifications" inside the form editor.

Confirm the "Send to" email address is the one you actually want notifications sent to.

Don't change notification settings unless you're sure

If you're not confident in your form's settings, contact us. An accidental change can break the form further.

What to send us

When you contact us, include:

Which form is affected and which page it's on
Whether submissions appear where your platform stores them (yes or no)
The email address that should receive notifications
Your email provider (Gmail, Outlook, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.)
When you last received a form notification successfully

On WordPress, we'll configure a reliable email-sending service for your site, which solves this permanently. On other platforms, we'll help you work through the notification settings and sending addresses above.

Common questions

I used to get form emails but stopped receiving them suddenly.

On WordPress, this often happens after a hosting migration, a server update, or a change in your email provider's spam rules. It's fixable. Contact us and we'll set up proper SMTP delivery.

On other platforms, check what changed. On Wix, changing your account email doesn't update who gets form notifications. On Webflow's free Starter plan, a site stops collecting submissions after 50 in total. Whatever your platform, a change in your email provider's spam rules can also be the cause.

I'm getting the confirmation email to the customer but not the notification to me.

The customer confirmation and the admin notification are separate messages, with different senders and recipients, so one can arrive while the other is filtered out or rejected. We can look at the admin notification on its own and fix it.

I've added the sender to my contacts but notifications still go to spam.

On WordPress, the underlying problem is that your site isn't sending email through a trusted service. Adding contacts helps a little, but a proper SMTP setup is the permanent fix.

On other platforms, check the platform's advice in Step 3: Webflow suggests a named address rather than a shared one like info@, Wix suggests a recipient that isn't the same as the sender and lists the addresses to allow, and on Shopify your sender domain may need authenticating.

I can't find an 'Entries' section for my form.

On WordPress, Contact Form 7 does not store entries by default. You need a companion plugin like Flamingo to store submissions. WPForms is the same: it doesn't store entries without a paid license, though its Lite Connect option can back them up off-site. So an empty entries list doesn't mean the form failed. Contact us and we'll set submission storage up for you.

On other platforms, see Step 2. Shopify's built-in contact form has no list of submissions, only the emails. A Webflow form with a custom action isn't stored in Webflow.