Form not sending mail to Gmail (but sending to Office365)

Question

We have had a Divi contact form on our GoDaddy hosted site that happily sent messages to our gmail account for years. About a month ago it stopped working.

I changed the email address to send to a company domain office365 email address and it works. But when the form is set to send to our email address on gmail workspace (our own domain name) the message never shows up (not in inbox, not in spam, not in deleted items, no place).

We would love any insight on why they just started happening and how we might be able to troubleshoot. Could not find any mail logs in WordPress.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WordPress/comments/10jv867/godaddy_hosted_divi_contact_form_not_sending_mail/

Answer

The sender was missing SPF and DKIM entries in his DNS records. The problem only arose when Google changed their policy to require senders to have valid SPF and DKIM records after a certain date.

Google says:

Important: Starting November 2022, new senders who send email to personal Gmail accounts must set up either SPF or DKIM. Google performs random checks on new sender messages to personal Gmail accounts to verify they’re authenticated. Messages without at least one of these authentication methods will be rejected or marked as spam. This requirement doesn’t apply to you if you’re an existing sender. However, we recommend you always set up SPF and DKIM to protect your organization’s email and to support future authentication requirements.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/33786

There are more details in a Google support article titled Prevent mail to Gmail users from being blocked or sent to spam which has a long list of recommendations for helping your emails get through to Gmail inboxes.

Related articles

• How to fix: Divi contact form not sending mail