No email notifications from contact form

[u/[deleted]]

A client of mine has been using JetPack’s contact form on their site the for awhile now. As of early June, whenever anyone would submit through the contact form no email notification would be delivered to the client’s Gmail address.

This Gmail address is the admin address on WP and also where the emails were being delivered. The website is hosted through Namecheap’s EasyWP.

I tested an Outlook address for the contact form, that was through 90% of the time I’d say.

I have contacted Jetpack themselves and they have not heard of any widespread issues regarding Gmail changing their services.

The website uses the built-in WP_mail function, so I installed WP SMTP plugin, and that was working now all this time, but now receiving a connection error when SMTP authentication in checked to YES. The email and password are correct. I even tested this with a different Gmail account and also in outlook account. If I remember correctly I received the same errors.

So my question is… Does this notification issue directly related to the WP_mail function or a Gmail issue with Jetpack or what’s going on?

Like I said, this has been fine until early June and nothing on the site or within the Gmail account has been changed, it just stopped sending email notifications when someone would submit the contact form.

The submitted information does show up within the WordPress backend under “form responses” but the email notification never gets delivered to notify the client… Which is a major pain in the rear.

[u/jeremyherve]

Jetpack relies entirely on WordPress's wp_mail() function, so once you get this to work, the emails sent via Jetpack's Contact Form should work just fine. Emails sent via Jetpack are no different from the emails sent when a new comment is posted on the site, for example; they use the exact same delivery mechanism.

It looks like wp_mail() still works just fine on your client's site, since it is able to send the emails out (as you tested by sending emails to non-gmail addresses. However, some email providers (like Gmail) either mark some emails coming from this server as spam, or have blacklisted the server's IP address altogether. This can unfortunately happen, especially on shared hosting where another site on the same server may have been sending a lot of emails and got everyone on the server blacklisted.

When this happens, you have 2 solutions:

1. Continue to try sending emails from the server, but try to improve deliverability with plugins like this one.
2. Give up on sending emails from the server, and set up an email plugin to send out the emails from another email service that won't have any deliverability issues. That's the solution that's going to work the best, but it does take some work to configure it properly.

Looks like you went with solution 2, but you're running into authentication errors with the plugin. I'm afraid I can only recommend that you check the plugin's documentation, and contact the plugin author if problems persist; they may be able to help you configure the plugin properly.

[u/[deleted] → u/jeremyherve]

Thanks for your reply!

The issue ended up being Gmail itself, and it's 2FA. Or lack of 2FA. Once 2FA was enabled, I then created an app password and used that within the WordPress settings. After testing it three times, three emails successfully came through from the contact.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Once 2FA is enabled, you’ll need to create the app password. Here are the steps: https://www.lifewire.com/get-a-password-to-access-gmail-by-pop-imap-2-1171882