Troubleshooting contact form emails that won’t send succcessfully

Sometimes your website may run into issues sending emails, and there are a couple of reasons this can happen. We’ve detailed some of the common causes, and how to fix them in this article.

cPanel Email Routing settings are incorrect

It’s important to double check the email routing settings inside cPanel, to ensure that emails are being delivered to the correct place. We have a separate guide regarding the different email routing options and what each one does.

You’re trying to send emails via a 3rd Party SMTP Server

For server security and stability reasons, we do not allow you to send emails out via a 3rd party SMTP server from your website. You need to use the local SMTP server, here are the details you need to do this:

Server Hostname: localhost Port:  465 Encryption: TLS Username: Email account you want to send emails from Password: The password for the email account you are sending out of

You need to create an email account inside cPanel, before sending emails out via the local SMTP server.

The SMTP Settings are incorrect

If you’re trying to send emails out via the local SMTP Server and not using the following details, you may run into problems:

Server Hostname: localhost Port: 465 Encryption: TLS Username: Email account you want to send emails from Password: The password for the email account you are sending out of

The email you are trying to send from/to doesn’t exist or is invalid

If the email address you are trying to send from/to doesn’t actually exist, you may run into issues sending the email. This is because the sending and recipient server will run some extra checks to ensure the email is legitimate/valid. If the sender/recipient doesn’t exist, the email will usually fail to send.

Plugin incompatibility or issues

You may have multiple website plugins installed that are interfering with each other. A good way to test this would be to disable every plugin except for the one used to send the email, then test the plugin again.

Another possible reason might be that there is something wrong in the plugin’s settings. An example of this might be the captcha setting being incorrect in Contact Form 7 for WordPress.