Your website is sending emails right now.
Password resets. Order receipts. Contact form notifications. Booking confirmations.
Half of them might not be arriving. And nobody’s told you.
The Quiet Problem
Here’s how most WordPress sites send email out of the box. The site’s software writes the email. Then it hands it to the hosting server. The hosting server sends it, claiming to be you.
That used to work. It doesn’t anymore.
Gmail, Outlook, and Apple have all tightened the rules. If the email isn’t properly signed — digitally proving it really came from your domain — they drop it in spam. Or reject it entirely.
The customer never sees it. You don’t know it happened. The email just quietly disappeared.
The customer never sees the email. You don’t know it happened. It just quietly disappeared.
Why the Big Providers Are Strict Now
Spam used to flood inboxes. A bloke in Russia would send a million fake “your bank password is expired” emails claiming to be from ANZ. People clicked. People got robbed.
So Gmail, Outlook, and Apple got serious. They demanded proof. If you claim an email’s from a domain, prove it. No proof, no inbox.
Fair enough. Good for everyone. Except the small business owner whose WordPress site never got set up properly, and whose customers are silently not getting their password reset links.
How to Check If Yours Is Broken
Takes five minutes. No tech skills needed.
- Go to your own website. Click the “forgot password” link.
- Enter an email address you own at Gmail. Not one you used before. A fresh one.
- Wait two minutes.
- Check the inbox. Check spam. Check Promotions. Check everywhere.
No email? Your system’s broken. Email in spam? Still broken — customers don’t dig through spam.
The Fix: A Proper Sender
The fix is to stop your website sending email itself. Hand the job to a dedicated service built for this.
There are a handful of good ones. Postmark. Sendgrid. Mailgun. Amazon SES. Each runs proper servers that Gmail and Apple actually trust.
Postmark is our pick for small business. The free tier is enough for most sites. The paid tier is around ten bucks a month for up to 10,000 emails. It separates transactional emails — receipts, resets, notifications — from bulk marketing. The big inboxes love that.
The DNS Bit Nobody Explains
Here’s where most owners give up. Don’t.
To prove to Gmail that an email really came from your domain, you have to add a few records to your DNS. DNS is the invisible phonebook that turns domain names into server addresses.
Postmark (or whichever sender you pick) gives you three or four little text records. They look like gibberish. You paste them into your DNS settings — usually at your domain registrar like GoDaddy or Cloudflare — and save.
That’s the handshake. Now Gmail looks at the email, checks the records, sees they match, lets it through.
Paste three DNS records. Save. That’s the handshake that tells Gmail your emails are real.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Every email your website sends that doesn’t arrive is a small wound.
A customer tries to reset their password. It doesn’t come. They give up. You lost the sale.
A customer fills in your contact form. You never get the notification. They never hear back. They ring the competitor.
A customer places an order. The receipt never arrives. They panic, think it’s a scam, call the bank. Chargeback.
One broken email. Three lost customers. Repeat every week. All because a few DNS records were never set up.
Bulk Email vs Transactional — Don’t Mix Them
Here’s where a lot of businesses get in trouble.
They set up Mailchimp for newsletters. Then they use the same sending domain for password resets. One customer marks a newsletter as spam. The spam filters now flag every email from that domain — including the password resets.
Keep them separate. Newsletters through Mailchimp or similar, on a sub-domain like news.yourdomain.com. Transactional emails — receipts, resets, contact forms — through Postmark on your main domain.
Different lanes. Different reputations. One bad newsletter doesn’t burn your order receipts.
The Setup, Step by Step
For most WordPress sites, here’s the whole job.
- Sign up at postmarkapp.com. Free account for up to 100 emails a month.
- Verify your sending domain. Postmark gives you three DNS records.
- Paste those records into your DNS settings at your domain registrar. Save.
- Install the “Postmark” plugin in WordPress. Paste in your API key.
- Send a test email from WordPress. Check it arrives properly.
Fifteen minutes. Done forever. Every email your site sends, from now on, actually arrives.
What to Do If You’re Not Sure
If the DNS bit makes your eyes glaze over, don’t push through and break something. DNS mistakes can take your website, your email, or both offline.
Get a hand. Most decent web designers or developers can do the whole setup in under an hour. It’s worth paying for if it means your customer emails actually arrive.
If you’d rather it was just handled, have a look at our web design service. Every site we build is configured with proper email sending from day one. For more on website fundamentals, see how to tell if your website is actually working and eight questions to ask before hiring a web designer.
The Quiet Truth
You wouldn’t run a shop with a letterbox that dropped half the mail on the floor.
But that’s what a default WordPress site is doing, every day, without telling you. Password resets. Receipts. Notifications. Half of them on the floor behind the door.
Fifteen minutes with Postmark fixes it. Forever.
Test your site’s email today. If it’s broken, it’s been costing you customers the whole time.
