Not receiving all notifications

It sounds like your hosting provider has disabled PHP’s mail() function, which WordPress uses to send you email notifications and is also used by contact form plugins and more.

This is a common safeguard employed by hosting providers when they suspect that another customer on the same server is sending spam emails directly from the server.

Another alternative is that PHP’s mail() function is still active, but spammer activity from the server has already caused any email sent from it to be blocklisted. This would result in the emails being sent but never received by any email address with basic anti-spam capabilities.

You can check this by leaving a comment on your site and checking if you receive an email. Another alternative would be to use the Health Check plugin and send yourself a test email from the plugin’s Tools tab to see if it works.

If you didn’t receive a test email, you could try using an SMTP plugin to configure your WordPress site to use your email’s outgoing mail server instead of PHP’s mail() function.

Thank you for your prompt reply, James. I shall work through your checklist.

I installed WP Mail SMTP and configured for the email service my website host (Hostinger) provides but couldn’t get it to work. Hostinger assures me there should be no problems from their end. Do you know if it will work using the configuration from my usual email provider (Thunderbird)?

Were you able to receive the test email from the Health Check plugin?

With a little help from my hosting company (Hostinger) I finally got WP Mail SMPT up and working. Unfortunately the test emails I sent also disappeared. I finally found them in the junk folder on the webmail account I have with my Internet service provider, an account I rarely use or even think about. Now the challenge will be to ensure that notifications are sent to my regular email app, Thunderbird, quite aside from figuring out why the test messages were considered to be junk.