How To Solve WordPress Not Sending Emails To Gmail Accounts

When someone visits your website and signs up for a newsletter, fills out your contact form, or makes a purchase but doesn’t receive a confirmation in their Gmail account, it can be a bad user experience your you and your visitors. This problem can lead to fewer sales and fewer newsletter sign-ups. It’s also important to track how many visitors are reaching out to you through Gmail on your WordPress website.

You May Ask – Why Is My WordPress Website Not Receiving Gmail Emails?

The first thing you should do to make sure you aren’t missing emails in Gmail is to check your spam folder. Sometimes, Gmail sends certain messages to the spam folder, and you need to mark them as not spam for them to show up in your inbox.

If you check the spam folder and still can’t find the emails, it might mean that your WordPress website isn’t set up correctly to send emails to Gmail. Usually, WordPress uses the server from your website’s hosting provider to send emails using a special function called wp_mail(), which is based on PHP.

Check Your Spam Folder On Gmail To Be Sure

The first thing you should do to make sure you aren’t missing emails in Gmail is to check your spam folder. Sometimes, Gmail sends certain messages to the spam folder, and you need to mark them as not spam for them to show up in your inbox. If you check the spam folder and still can’t find the emails, it might mean that your WordPress website isn’t set up correctly to send emails to Gmails.

Usually, WordPress uses the server from your website’s hosting provider to send emails using a special function called wp_mail(), which is based on PHP.

Why Does WordPress Sometimes Prevent Emails From Sending?

I think WordPress stops this process to help site owners avoid getting a lot of spammy messages in their emails. But there’s a simple fix for this problem. I will share the steps I took to solve it.

How To Fix Gmail Not Receiving Emails From WordPress

We’re going to use a WordPress Plugin called WP Mail SMTP to fix the problem of emails not showing up in Gmail. This plugin helps your WordPress site send emails using Gmail, Mailgun, SendGrid, or SMTP instead of the regular mail system that WordPress has. It also comes with a simple settings page where you can change the settings to fit your needs easily.

How To Install WP Mail SMTP On WordPress Dashboard

To install this plugin go to the “Plugins” section on the left side of your WordPress dashboard. Hover over it and click on “Add New.” In the search box on the right side of the page, type “WP Mail SMTP” and find the plugin. Click on it to install it, and then click on “Activate” to turn it on.

How To Configure WP Mail SMTP

If you successfully click and activate the plugin, it will take you to the setup wizard. This wizard will help you configure the SMTP settings so that you can fully set up WP Mail SMTP on your website with no issues.

To move forward, please click on the highlighted “Let’s Get Started” button. Then, pick the Google/Gmail mailer from the list of options. After that, read the message on the pop-up page and click “I Understand” to continue the next step.

The mailer settings let you set up Gmail to send emails using Google’s system. On this page, you will need to provide your client ID, client secret, and an authorized redirect link. This information helps us get approval from Google so the plugin can send emails from your Gmail account.

How To Create A Project On Google Cloud

To get everything set up and working, we will make a project in Google Cloud that will let us connect smoothly to WP Mail SMTP using Google’s API. Open Google Cloud using the link below.

Open Google Cloud Here

Click on “Select Project” on the Google Cloud page. Then. choose “New Project” from the top right corner of the popup that appears. This is where you can create your first project, which we will use to set up our mailer plugin on the WordPress dashboard.

To move forward with this step, we need to name our project. You can pick any name you like, or you can keep it simple by calling it WP Mail SMTP. After that, just click the blue “Create” button to go to the next step.

Once you create your project, you will see the next screen. I will share the other steps with you so that you can set up your mailer quickly and easily.

How To Activate Gmail API On Google Cloud

We will continue by turning on the Gmail API. First, we need to find where to do this. To do that, look for three short horizontal lines at the top left corner of the page. Click on those lines to open the menu, then find and click on the “APIs & Services” section. This will help us continue.

In the search box below the “Welcome to API Library” section, or by scrolling down to the Google Workspace area, find the Gmail API. Then, click the button that says “Enable.”

We need to create the login details for WP Mail SMTP after turning on the Gmail API. To do this, click the “Create Credential” button at the top right of the page. We will fill in the necessary information for our email tool.

First, choose “Gmail API” from the options, then check the box for “User data” to show what information we will use. After that, click “Next” to continue to the next step.

Next, we will go to the OAuth Consent Screen. Here, we will give our app a name, add an email for user support, upload an app logo, and provide our contact information. Use the same email for both the user support and developer contact details. After filling everything out, click on “Save and Continue” to move forward.

Next, we will go to the screen where we set up the OAuth Client ID. Here, we will choose the type of application we are using, which is “Web Application.” We’ll keep everything else the same.

To add the Authorized redirect URIs, we will go back to the WP Mail SMTP setup on our WordPress dashboard and copy the URL from the “Authorized Redirect URI” section on the setup wizard page.

We will take the redirect link from there and go back to the Google Cloud dashboard to paste the link we copied from WordPress. Then, we will click on the blue button that says “Create” at the bottom. After that, we need to change our app from testing mode to production mode.

How To Move Our App From Testing To Production

To complete this step correctly, we will go to the OAuth Consent Screen on the left side of the page. Click on “Audience” on the left. Then, under “Publishing Status,” click on “Publish App.” A popup will appear, click on “Confirm.” After you confirm, you will see the screen below.

How To Get The Credentials For the WP MAIL SMTP Plugin

We will set up the WP MAIL SMTP plugin with the right information from our Google Cloud dashboard. To proceed, we’ll go to the left side of the page and find “Credentials” under the “APIs & Services” menu. Click on the “Edit” button on the right side of our application.

Here, you’ll see the “Client ID” and “Client Secret.” Copy these and paste them into the WP MAIL SMTP setup wizard. After you’ve pasted the information, scroll down and click “Connect to Google” to link your account.

How To Give WP MAIL SMTP Permission From Google

Pick the Gmail account you used to sign up and make an application on Google Cloud. Give WP Mail SMTP the permissions it needs to use this app by connecting it. After you finish this step, a popup will show saying “Successful Authorization.” Click “OK” to move forward. Then, scroll down and click “Save and Continue” to keep going.

You will then go to a page asking which email features you want to use. Since we are on the free version (the light version), we can only pick three features that are already enabled for us. The reason is that the rest are for paid users.

Scroll down and click on Save and Continue. Follow the next steps and click on Finish Setup to complete everything. Now you can receive Gmail emails from your WordPress website from clients and subscribers.