Emails Don’t Work / Email Problems

Emails are sent through WordPress and your website host.

Your website hosting company would be the best source for information on correct email settings.

Please try out the different methods below to see what works for you. Try in the order listed below.

Are Payments Stuck on “Pending”?

If a payment does not go through, your customer will not get an email because no payment was made.

To check if a payment went through successfully in WordPress, click Payment History under Beat Store on the sidebar. Under Status, check if the payment says Pending or Complete.

If the payment says Pending, check out this post for more instructions.

If the payment says Complete, an email should have been sent to you and your customer.

Proceed to step 2 below if your payments are marked as complete.

Update Your Sent “From Email” Address

Because of spammers, some website hosts will not let you send emails from your website from a free email address. S,o you need to update your “From Email” address with an email address that includes your domain name.

Example: If your domain is hotbeats.com. You may need an email address that looks like contact@hotbeats.com so it can properly be sent from your web server.

Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail may not be allowed for some web hosts. So you need to test this out.

How to test out this problem:

1. In WordPress, click Settings under Beat Store on the sidebar.

2. Click the Emails tab.

3. Update the email address in the “From Email” input. Put in a fake email address that includes your domain name, like info@yourdomain.com. Include your real domain address.

4. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Now, do a test purchase on your website and see if you get the emails. If you get the email, the problem is that your host requires you to use an email address that includes your domain name. Check with your host ( or domain company ) on how to create an email box or forward emails using your domain name. Your email-sending problem should now be fixed if you got the email.

If this doesn’t work, continue to suggestion 3.

Update Email Sending Settings

If the two steps above do not work, then WordPress may not be sending email properly from your server and you need to install a free plugin to help.

To fix this problem, you will need to install the WP-Mail-SMTP WordPress plugin and do a little research on your web host’s SMTP Host & SMTP Port information.

Install WP-Mail-SMTP Plugin

1. In WordPress, click Add New under Plugins on the sidebar. On the plugins page,e search for WP-Mail-SMTP and click enter. Click the Install Now link and activate the plugin.

2. Once installed, click Email under Settings on the sidebar.

3. Fill in the Advanced Email Options.

This was new to me, so it unfortunately took me an hour to find the correct settings trying to use a Gmail email address. I eventually gave up on the Gmail connection and used my web host’s mail server.

I went into my host’s cPanel ( Dreamhost), went to mail, and created an email address/account for my hiphopmakers.com domain address. S,o I had to make an email account with my host to use the settings I provided below. Example: contact@hiphopmakers.com

I suggest you do a Google search for your hostname SMTP settings or contact your host directly to ask for the proper settings to save yourself some time.

Below are the settings I used to get the email settings to work.

What I filled out:

• From Name: Hip Hop Makers
• Mailer: Checked Send all WordPress emails via SMTP.
• Return Path: Checked this box
• SMTP Host: mail.hiphopmakers.com ( This will need to be your web address. Example: mail.your-address.com )
• SMTP Port: 465 ( This will change depending on your web host )
• Encryption: Checked Use SSL encryption.
• Authentication: Yes: Use SMTP authentication.
• Username: Entered my Dreamhost email username.
• Password: Entered my Dreamhost email password.

Then Save Changes.

Do some test emails on the bottom of the Advanced Email Options page. Also, test multiple email addresses, because,e for a while, it would only work on one email and not the other.

Reference Articles:

• How To Use Google’s SMTP Server
• Search for WordPress won’t send Emails
• Dreamhost- How should I configure SMTP?