There are several reasons that emails from form submissions on your website may not be making it to your inbox or may be going to spam. Below are our general troubleshooting steps to diagnose and fix email issues:

1. Use a Domain-Matching "From" Address

Start by verifying that your website's outgoing emails are sent using a "from" address that matches your website's domain name. For example, if your site is example.com, your emails should come from an address like info@example.com or no-reply@example.com, and not example@gmail.com or another unrelated address.

Mismatched domains can raise red flags with spam filters and lead to delivery failures or having the emails sent to spam.

2. Whitelist the Sending Address

If your site sends emails to a specific group of recipients regularly (e.g., staff, subscribers, or clients), ask them to whitelist your sending address or domain. This improves deliverability by telling their email systems that messages from your domain are expected and safe.

For some email services, you may need to coordinate with your IT team to add the domain or email address to the allowlist on corporate mail servers or spam filters.

3. Set Up Your SPF and DMARC Records

One of the most critical steps is ensuring your domain's Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is properly configured. SPF helps mail servers verify that your website or its email delivery service (like Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc.) is authorized to send email on behalf of your domain.

TinyFrog hosts your website on WPEngine and WP Engine servers use the email relay service MailChannels to deliver emails sent from WordPress. As such, we highly recommend allowlisting email sent through MailChannels with an SPF record configured at your DNS host.

An SPF record is set as a TXT record similarly to DMARC, like so:

v=spf1 include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all

If you already have an SPF record, simply add the MailChannels relay to the existing record rather than adding a separate record. For example: v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net include:mailgun.org include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all

This SPF record should be set at your DNS host, where DNS is managed for the sending domain.

Your IT team may have to assist with setting up your DMARC record, WPEngine provides additional details for this record here.

4. Send email through an email Account or relay service if the above steps do not work

If the above steps do not resolve your email delivery issues then you may need to connect your website to an email account and have emails sent through that service or use a 3rd party email relay service such as Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

You can read more about these options in our how-to guide here.