No email sent to buyer but log said it is sent successfully

Hi masakoomoto, if you can can you test a different e-mail account and not another hotmail account.

Thank you

The email may have been sent, but Hotmail threw into their black hole on reception.

My gut says one of these three things:

1. Your From address is Hotmail.com, but you are not sending your mail via smtp.live.com and Microsoft tossed your email because you violated their sender policy (SPF).
2. Your From address is Yahoo.com, but you are not sending your mail via smtp.mail.yahoo.com and Microsoft tossed your email because of Yahoo’s DMARC policy
3. You have a custom domain name and Microsoft tossed your email because you violated your own sender policy (SPF)

The thing with black holes is sometimes your email go there, sometimes they don’t, and this usually depends on how suspicious the email content is.

First of all, thanks for the quick reply! and sorry, I think I was too sleepy to write this and may not be clear about what account is used for what in the original post.

To clarify, I used:

PayPal – registered with Hotmail.com account
From email address in WP – sales@<mydomain>.com account
seller notification mail in WP – gmail account

So, is the Hotmail account the culprit? I did check spam folder in the Hotmail account but did not see anything. I will test with PayPal account with different account later.

The email that is failing – we know the receiver is @hotmail.com… who is the sender? I couldn’t follow what you wrote.

“From email address” is set to [email protected] where GaiaVoce is my domain name. But it seems this setting can be anything, as far as I can tell? Our SP is GoDaddy.

I created another PayPal account using gmail email address as primary email. It worked just fine, so it looks Hotmail is the culprit here. Has anyone ran into this before? We can’t really ask our customer not to use hotmail account…

@masakoomoto I would ask GoDaddy about your issue, they should point you in the right direction.

I personally am not too fond of GoDaddy hosting, sorry to say.

@masakoomoto

I just spent a few days solving this same issue for another GoDaddy user. Hotmail is dumping your email because your SPF is missing.

Your MX is okay, that’s a GoDaddy server:

gaiavoce.com.		3599	IN	MX	10 mailstore1.secureserver.net.
gaiavoce.com.		3599	IN	MX	0 smtp.secureserver.net.

But your SPF is missing:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gaiavoce.com.			IN	TXT

Add a TXT record to your DNS zonefile that looks like this:

"v=spf1 a mx include:secureserver.net ~all"

Here are some instructions: https://www.mail-tester.com/spf/godaddy

Then install any SMTP plugin and set-up your config like this:

server: relay-hosting.secureserver.net
port: 25
no authentication
encryption: STARTTLS

That should do it.

Thank you for the solution @postman SMTP – I haven’t had a chance to try that yet but will post the result when I get a chance to try it.

Our pleasure