There are a few different reasons this could be happening:
- Problematic Configuration of Gravity Forms Notifications
- Issues with WP system email address being flagged by email providers as spam
- Issues with WP Cron and your webhost’s email system
Problematic Configuration of Gravity Forms Notifications
The main issue that we see correlated most with the failure to send out delayed notification emails are a mixture of problematic configuration settings with emails in both WordPress and Gravity Forms notifications, especially with regard to emails and spam.
We HAVE seen instances these problematic setups can prevent delayed emails from going out, even though non-delayed Gravity Forms notification emails are able to send successfully.
In order to rule out a problematic configuration on your site, please thoroughly go through this troubleshooting guide from Gravity Forms and make sure none of the problematic issues described with regard to which emails to use as well as site/server authentications DO NOT apply to your site. If they do, please resolve this issues before assuming that that the issue is with Gravity Forms Delayed Notifications itself.
Gravity Forms Troubleshooting Guide: Use a valid From Address
Issues with Transactional Email Spam
Many people use their business or personal domain email address as the From email set in WordPress. While their email client (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) has full authority to send email on behalf of your domain name (mydomain.com), a lot of people fail to provide their WordPress site with that same authority to send out email on behalf of your domain name. What can happen is that you can send out an email from Gmail using your me@mydomain.com email address and your recipient will be sure to get it, however, if your WordPress site sends the email using the same From address (me@mydomain.com), the email address may be blocked by your customer’s email provider. Sometimes the latter happens only for delayed notifications, while immediate notifications can slide by despite being suspected of spam.
To make sure this isn’t causing the problem, please use the following site to get a spam score for your WordPress’ From email address:
For this, you’ll need to send out an email to the email address they give you FROM your WordPress site, not from your Gmail or Outlook. To do this, go into Gravity Forms, find an old entry, then use the resend notification feature to send the form notification to the email address they give you at mail-tester.com. Then check the score at mail-tester.com in about 30 seconds and they’ll give you a spam score. Anything less than 7 should be fixed before moving on to #2 below.
Hosting Provider Issues
Some hosting providers may have limited support for your website’s generated emails and can block emails from our plugin from being sent out.
If you’ve encountered any issues with delayed notifications being sent out, first try to deactivate our plugin and see if the Gravity Forms notifications go out successfully. If they do not still, the issue is probably somehow that your web host is refusing to send out emails from your site and thus you should contact your hosting provider for assistance.
If your emails are being sent with our plugin deactivated but are not being sent when our plugin is activated, it’s possible that your hosting provider may not like to see emails sent utilizing the WP-Cron, a function of WordPress that our plugin utilizes.
To overcome this issue, we recommended bypassing your hosting provider’s transactional email system by utilizing a plugin that can send site emails through SMTP (using your email provider) or through one of the following transactional email providers and their corresponding WordPress plugins:
- Postmark (Companion Plugin) – Our personal favorite – we use this for all of our site emails
- SendGrid (Companion Plugin) – Popular transactional email provider
- WP Mail SMTP – Setup your Gmail or Outlook email providers to send emails on behalf of your WordPress site
- Mandrill (Companion Plugin) – For Mailchimp Customers only, so if you’re a user of Mailchimp this is a great option because it’s free for you