Form not sending email

How to fix a form that isn't sending email

When a visitor submits a form and the notification never arrives, there are seven places to check — in order.

Work through the steps below from top to bottom.

Most problems are resolved by step 3.

Scenario used throughout this guide: your business has a Contact form at /contact.

Visitors submit it, the rows appear in the admin Submissions list — but nothing reaches support@yourdomain.com.

What is this for?

This guide is for SGEN site owners and admins who can see form submissions in the admin panel but are not receiving the notification email in their inbox.

It is a structured decision tree: each check tells you what to look at, what a healthy state looks like, and what action fixes an unhealthy one.

If you have never built the form yet, start with Build a form first — this guide assumes the form exists and is saving submissions.

If you are not sure whether the form is saving at all, jump straight to Check 7 (Submissions record) before anything else.

Good use cases

Example 1: SMTP is off — the most common root cause. The site was migrated to a new host.

The previous host allowed PHP mail on port 25; the new host blocks it.

Every form notification, password reset, and order receipt stops arriving at the same time.

Flipping Enable SMTP on in Settings → Email and pasting the provider credentials fixes all of them at once — one change, one transport.

Example 2: Notification recipient field was never filled in. A form was duplicated from an older form to save setup time.

The Title and fields were updated, but Mail Settings → To was left blank from the original.

Every submission silently discards the notification because there is no address to route it to.

No error appears to the visitor or the admin — the submission saves, the email never fires.

Opening the form, filling in support@yourdomain.com in the To field, and clicking Update a Form fixes it immediately.

Example 3: Tracking Consent is gating the form notification. The site has Gate Draft Form Entries turned on under Tracking Consent.

Visitors who declined the consent banner on their first visit are having partial auto-saves suppressed.

On a short form (Name, Email, Message) this causes no problem — a completed submit still fires the notification.

On a longer form with many fields, the auto-save suppression can interact with how the submission is recorded, and notifications arrive late or not at all for decline-banner visitors.

Turning off Gate Draft Form Entries in Tracking Consent → Settings restores normal notification behavior and does not affect analytics consent gating.

What NOT to use this for

• Do not use this guide to troubleshoot marketing or newsletter emails. Marketing emails go through a separate sending platform and are not routed through SGEN's form notification system. This guide covers only SGEN admin-generated notifications: form submissions, password resets, order receipts.
• Do not use the Email Testing card to send real customer communications. The test tool sends one diagnostic email to one recipient with a fixed subject. It is a verification tool only.
• Do not assume a repeated confirmation notice on the test-email card means multiple emails were sent. If you enter an invalid address in the Testing card, the panel shows the validation notice more than once. No emails were queued. Enter a valid address and a message of at least 5 characters, then verify delivery in the actual inbox.
• Do not skip to the spam folder (Check 5) before verifying Checks 1–3. Wrong SMTP credentials and an empty notification recipient are by far the most common causes, and both take under a minute to fix.

How this connects to other features

• Settings → Email — the SMTP transport that carries form notifications is the same transport used by password resets, order receipts, and admin user-invitation emails. Fixing the transport in Configure SMTP fixes all of them at once.
• Forms → Build a form — the Mail Settings card inside the form builder is where the notification recipient (To field) and email template live. See Build a form for the full field reference including shortcode tokens.
• Tracking Consent — the Gate Draft Form Entries exclusion interacts with form submission timing. See Configure the cookie consent banner for the Exclusions reference.
• Forms → Submissions — the submissions list confirms whether the form's save path is healthy, independent of email delivery. If rows appear here, the problem is in the delivery chain, not the form itself.

Before you start

• You are signed in to SGEN as an Administrator or Site Owner.
• You can reach Settings → Email and Forms → All Forms in the left navigation.
• You have access to the inbox that should be receiving notifications (support@yourdomain.com in this example).
• You know the URL of the form page (e.g. /contact) so you can submit a test entry yourself.

Where to go

1. Open your SGEN admin left navigation.
2. For SMTP checks: click Appearance → Site Settings, then the Email tab.
3. For form notification checks: click Forms → All Forms, then click the form name.
4. For consent checks: click Tracking Consent → Settings.
5. For submission records: click Forms → Submissions (or click View Entries from inside the form editor).

Steps

1. Check that SMTP credentials are populated in Mail Settings

Open Settings → Email.

Look at the SMTP Configuration card.

The fields are: Enable SMTP, Host, Encryption, Port, Username, and Password.

Check that Host, Port, and Username contain real provider values — not blank, not placeholder text.

A fully configured SMTP card for your business on SendGrid looks like this: