Not getting WordFence notifications

Check your hosting control panel to see if you have spam filtering (Spam Assassin or equivalent) enabled on your domain… also double-check you don’t have a typo in your email address in the WF settings.

I’ve already double-checked and triple-checked the spelling of the email address in WordFence. And one of the first things I did was check on hosting spam filtering. I’m getting email at that address from everybody but WordFence.

Strange – WF Support will likely have to chime in here, then…

Hi there! Thanks for providing all of the background information. It sounds as though your site’s mail server isn’t playing nicely with your WordPress installation. Do you get other site notifications from your website such as registration emails? If you ran the Wordfence diagnostic test for outbound emails and nothing arrived, that means the site itself isn’t sending out emails, which would explain why you’re not getting alerts.

You could try installing and configuring an SMTP plugin for your WordPress installation (I recommend creating a throwaway domain email such as [email protected] for this purpose and not using an existing/in-use domain email.) The WordPress plugin repo has several very highly rated plugins for this very purpose.

If this still doesn’t work, that would point to an issue with your site’s mail server. Let me know if this doesn’t work or if you have any other questions.

Hi, wfandie,

I’m only semi-literate technically, and I’m reluctant to install an SMTP plugin, at least for now. But I tried a couple of other things.

In the past, I simply sent test emails and they didn’t arrive at the destination. However, I just noticed this WF message when I send a test email: “The result we received from the WordPress wp_mail() function was: False.” I tried changing the email address to the one I use for my other WF site, grammarphobia.com, and I get the same false response.

I completely understand it can seem very daunting! The message you received confirms that your website isn’t sending out emails at all and that it’s not strictly a Wordfence issue. Your best first line of defense really is setting up that plugin. Setting up an SMTP plugin doesn’t really require any special technical knowledge, though, don’t worry ?? All you do is install it like you would any other plugin, and then create a throwaway email address like [email protected] on your website’s cPanel. You’ll need your SMTP mail server (your web host can tell you what it is if your email setup dashboard in your cPanel doesn’t), plus the email address you created and the password for the email address to put in to the SMTP plugin’s settings, and it should work out of the box. If the test email from the Wordfence diagnostics page still is giving you a FALSE, you’ll want to have your web host look in to your mail server’s current settings to see why your website isn’t sending email out correctly. Hope that helps, but let me know if any of this isn’t clear!

Hi, wfandie,

I decided to skip the SMTP plugin and go directly to my web host. It turns out that there was a lock on email from the server. It’s now removed and a WF test email was OK, so I’m marking the problem resolved. Thanks for all your help.