Confirmation emails not being recieved

The reason for this could be that Gmail rejects the emails due to missing SMTP authentication when sending and/or missing SPF record at the domain and/or missing DKIM record at the domain.

You can set up SMTP authentication in WordPress with plugins such as https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/. This would cause WordPress to send all emails to the outside world via a mail server you specify. WP Mail SMTP also shows you warnings if the domain used is not fully configured for sending emails.

If a setting on the domain itself is missing, please contact the support of your email and domain service provider for a solution.

Thanks for responding to my post so quickly. It looks like some of the confirmation emails came through, just delayed by a day. Unfortunately, I had cancelled and reset it to a different email since then to see if it might come through there. I’m still waiting on the current confirmation email to come through… given that the email did eventually come through, this seems like less of an issue with rejections from Gmail and more of an issue with the word press system not sending the emails in a timely manner?

working in WP is a foreign experience for me, so your knowledge on the subject is very helpful!

I see it the other way around. WordPress immediately transfers emails to be sent to the relevant services, which then actually send the email. There is no mechanism in WordPress that delays this. You can easily understand this if you use a mail logging plugin to see what is sent out by WordPress. Such a logging also contains the exact time of delivery to the responsible mail service (which is not WordPress but your hosting or an SMTP server, depending on what you have configured).

The receiving email server then uses various anti-spam mechanisms that can actually delay email receipt. In the past, for example, so-called greylisting was often used, which could sometimes lead to a delay in delivery of up to an hour. As far as I know, the Gmail you mentioned no longer uses this, but they have other anti-spam techniques that could also cause such delays.

My recommendation would therefore be to continue using the SMTP plugin mentioned above. If you enter Gmail as the sending server there, you bypass all the anti-spam techniques and the e-mail should also arrive promptly.

I would also like to add that email is not and never has been a real-time communication. There are always delays, although it is quite unusual for them to be 30 minutes or more these days.

I’ll give it a shot! thanks again for your help!