I'm not getting form notification emails
What to do when your website forms are submitting correctly but the email notifications aren't arriving in your inbox.
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 rather than a broken form.
Quick summary
First, check your spam folder. Then confirm the form is storing submissions in your dashboard. If it is, the form works — only the email notification is failing. This is usually fixed by configuring your site to use a proper email-sending service. Contact us and we'll set it up.
Step 1 — Check your spam folder
Email from websites often gets flagged as spam because most websites send mail in a way that spam filters don't trust.
Open your email inbox and look in the spam, junk, or "promotions" folder (in Gmail, check the Promotions and Spam tabs).
Search for the form's email address — usually something like noreply@yoursite.com or wordpress@yoursite.com.
If you find it in spam, mark it as "Not spam" or add the sender address to your contacts. This trains your email service to trust future messages.
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.
Entries are recorded? Good.
You haven't lost any submissions. You can view them in the dashboard. Now we need to fix the email delivery so you receive notifications going forward.
Step 3 — Understand why this happens
Most web servers are not set up to send email reliably on their own. Without a proper email-sending service (called an SMTP service — a program that handles sending email securely), 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.
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 the form plugin's interface, 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 in the dashboard entries (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
We'll configure a reliable email-sending service for your site, which solves this permanently.
Common questions
Related guides
- My forms aren't working
- Email sent from your website explained
- Why your emails land in spam
- Working with contact forms in WordPress
- Info to gather before contacting support
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