Why Customers Aren’t Receiving Emails From Your Website

Imagine this scenario: a customer is finishing their purchase, submits the contact form, requests a password reset, and…silence. They check their e-mail box, refresh the page, and even check the spam folder. Nothing happens.

This situation for the business entails a lot more than just a technical error. Lack of order confirmations makes the customer wonder if his money was charged successfully. No contact form notifications results in loss of sales opportunities, and no password reset notifications instantly restrict access to the account.

The most annoying thing is that everything seems to work just fine! Your forms are submitted flawlessly, checkout goes without any errors, and nothing shows up on your computer screen.

So, why aren’t your clients’ email boxes getting anything at all? The problem lies beneath the surface and may concern such things as your website’s mail settings, your hosting, the lack of proper authentication files, and the reception server itself.

This article will discuss the most typical problems and explain how to resolve them in detail.

1. Email Restrictions at Your Hosting Service

There are some hosting companies that limit outgoing email from their servers in order to guard their systems from getting spammed or abused.

If you are facing any other issues with sending emails, then you could refer to this guide on “Common Web Hosting Issues And How To Solve “the Common Web Hosting Issues And How To Solve Them.”

For instance, your hosting plan may have limitations on the number of emails that you can send out in an hour. Other restrictions may apply too.

Such restrictions will impact contact form notifications, registration emails, order confirmations, and other auto-responses.

How to Fix It

• First check for email limitations imposed by your web host on outgoing emails.

If your website has abruptly stopped sending emails, you may want to check with your hosting company to see if:

• Your website has reached its sending quota.
• Sending emails has been blocked or put on hold.
• The necessary SMTP ports are accessible.
• There are any server side mail delivery problems.
• Your website’s mail service is down.
• When you have many automated emails being sent through your website on a daily basis, you may want to use a separate transactional email service provider for this.

It all comes down to your website traffic, number of emails, and limitations of your web hosting plan.

2. There Are No Correct Authentication Records for Emails for Your Website

This is because email authentication allows receiving servers to verify whether an email was really sent by that domain.

Should your authentication records for your domain be incomplete or wrongly configured, your emails may be rejected, filtered, or scrutinized by the receiving providers.
Here are three essential DNS records that you should know about.

If you require further elaboration on how these records operate, see “A Beginner’s Guide to DNS Records and What They Do.”

1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): SPF verifies which mail servers are permitted to transmit emails from your domain. If the email is transmitted via a server not included in your SPF records, then the transmission will be rejected.
2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing messages. This signature is used by receiving servers to determine whether the content and associated headers have been tampered with.
3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): DMARC provides instructions for dealing with failed authentication and alignment of emails. It also assists domain owners in generating reports regarding email authentication practices.

How to Fix It

• Review the DNS configuration of your domain to ensure that the recommended SPF and DKIM records of your email provider are set up properly. Also set up DMARC based on instructions from your host. If your domain name is managed at HarmonWeb, use this guide on how to change DNS records in HarmonWeb.
• Do not include several SPF records on the same domain since this can create problems during the SPF check process.

Remember also that while SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks are associated, they are independent from each other. Alignment of DMARC is very important when verifying that the authenticated domain is identical to the one found in the visible From address of the sender.

3. Your site configuration does not allow sending emails.

One of the things you should check is how your site sends messages. It turns out that many websites (WordPress sites for example) use mail( ) function of PHP by default. The problem is that the mail will be sent successfully only if the website hosting environment is set up to send the mail at all.

If the mail service provided by the server is not active, blocked, or incorrectly set up, your website may not be able to send out emails.

How to Fix It

• If you are using WordPress, you can use an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service offered by a reliable email provider.

Find out more on why your email from your website is not functioning and how to resolve this problem for other possible reasons for website email problems.

This means that your website will be able to send the message using a mail server which has been authorized instead of depending only on the local email facility of the web server.

What to do:

• Download a reliable WordPress SMTP plugin.
• Link it up to your corporate email or transactional email service.
• Fill out all the necessary data on the server.
• Test sending the email and checking its delivery reports.

Note: A successful email transmission via SMTP does not assure the delivery of the message to the intended recipient’s inbox. It only means that the message has been successfully delivered up to that point.

4. Your Emails Are Getting Rejected or Filtered by Receiving Servers

Sometimes your website will send an email successfully but the receiving mail server rejects it or filters it as spam. Even if everything on your website or email is seemingly alright, this may still be possible.

The receiving mail servers take into account many different aspects, among which are the sender IP’s reputation, the domain reputation, authentication status, content of the email message, and the sending behavior.

When you notice that emails from your website land in the spam folder and not in the inbox of your customers, refer to our article about why business emails end up in spam and how to solve it.

For instance, when your website shares the same outgoing IP address with other accounts, the abusive behavior of any sender can negatively impact the reputation of that IP. Although that might not necessarily always be the situation, it is worth bearing in mind.

How to Fix It

• Review the delivery status from the log files provided by your email host.
• Check for SMTP response codes and error messages which show whether the receiving server accepted, deferred, or rejected the email message.
• Permanent rejections mean that there is something wrong with the email address or the security test was not passed, while temporary rejections may suggest that there is some limit on the number of emails you can send or some temporary problem on the server side.
• Do not be misled by the content of your “Sent” folder either. Your “Sent” folder just shows that your mail application delivered your message – it does not necessarily mean that the recipient’s server received it.
• In case you receive bounce messages, you should pay attention to the errors described in order to understand why it happened.

5. Misconfiguration of Contact Form on Your Website

It is not always the case where email delivery failure occurs due to problems with the mail server. At times, such an anomaly can be experienced within your website. There might be errors in configuring the contact form plugin.

Plugins can have conflicts amongst each other, especially after updates. The form could show a successful message despite the fact that the notification process has failed within the whole process flow.

How to Fix It

Test the form and check the settings of the form.

• Check the recipient email address.
• Review the settings for notifications within the plugin.
• Check if the form is configured to send emails.
• Check the plugin logs for any errors.
• Find out if the problem began after an update of the plugin or WordPress.

In case this happens, try testing the same using the default theme and deactivating some of the non-essential plugins. Do not deactivate essential plugins on the live site without taking into account the effects on transactions and customers.

For an online store, all notifications should be tested separately. Notifications for new orders, receipt of customers, shipping status, and password reset notifications might have individual settings or ways of delivery.

6. The Email Sender Address Set Up on Your Website Isn’t Valid or Correct

Your website might be set up in such a way that the message is sent from an address that doesn’t even exist or not authorized by the service.

For instance, an email contact form may use the email address from Gmail as the sender’s From address. This causes difficulties in authentication and alignment since your site does not have permission to send emails using the Gmail account.

Other times, people tend to use addresses like [email protected] but fail to configure the sending tool properly.

How to Fix It

• Instead, you should use an address related to your own domain, such as [email protected], if your email system allows it.
• Ensure your website or SMTP plugin uses the authenticated sender identity as specified by your email service provider.
• With regard to contact forms, include the visitor’s address in the reply-to field instead of trying to make it seem like the mail came from that address. It enables you to send a response to the customer while making sure that your domain address is used for sending the message.
• Also, make sure that the address from where you will be sending your responses can receive emails.

7. Restrictions on the Number of Emails Sent per Day or Queuing of the Emails Is Making It Delayed

Some web sites send their emails instantly whereas others use queuing or scheduling to do that.

In case of a web site receiving a surge in orders or form submissions, processing of emails could be delayed due to limitations set up by the email provider.

On WordPress websites, scheduled tasks may be involved in processing certain plugin notifications. If there are issues with these processes, then certain emails may be stuck in pending status.

In case your scheduled jobs are not being executed properly, take a look at this article on how to troubleshoot WordPress cron jobs that are not working.

Solution to Problem

•  Review your email service provider’s sending limit, delivery queue and logs.
• Look for emails stuck in the queue. They will have retries, rate limit errors or authentication problems. Resolve the underlying problem before increasing sending volume.
• If you have trouble with WordPress and your issue is related to a particular plugin that depends on scheduled tasks, try checking whether these are being run right. Cron jobs can sometimes work better than relying only on site activity.
• In case your company sends lots of transactional emails, select a system that is able to process such loads and utilize a good retry mechanism. Do not send duplicate emails each time a message times out.

8. How to Debug Missing Email on Websites Step by Step

If you don’t know where to start, follow an organized debugging approach rather than making multiple changes at once.

Keep a log of the recipients who received the affected emails and the error messages. This information makes troubleshooting much easier.

When you test your emails, use email addresses which you can access from various domains. Look into the inbox and also the spam folder for the recipient.

In case the logs indicate that the message was accepted by the receiving server, but the recipient cannot locate the email, you should look for filtering done by the recipient’s email administrator or some other filtering done at lower levels.

Conclusion

If people are not getting emails from your website, then you should check that the issue is not arising due to the settings on your website, hosting limitations, email validation, or the recipient’s mail server.

Your task will be easier if you try to identify the origin of your problem from the moment that your website created the message to the point when the recipient’s server either accepted or rejected it.

Do not guess anymore; get to work by checking out your logs, your DNS, the SMTP configuration, and the particular error messages that you are getting.

Are you in need of improved web hosting services?

A solid website hosting system is what ensures hassle-free experience. Go ahead and check out HarmonWeb to get some hosting services that will suit your growing needs and also ensure that your emails get delivered without fail to your customers.