Why Website Emails Stop Working (and how we sort it)

If your website relies on contact forms or enquiry emails, it’s easy to assume everything is working fine as long as you occasionally see messages coming through. The reality is that website email delivery has become far less reliable over the past few years, and many businesses are missing enquiries without ever realising it.

What’s changed isn’t your website. It’s how email providers now decide which messages they trust.

In the past, websites could send emails directly from their hosting server and expect them to arrive without much trouble. That’s how most WordPress contact forms still work by default. Today, however, major email providers like Google and Microsoft apply far stricter rules. Emails sent directly from web servers are treated with suspicion, especially when they appear to come from your domain but haven’t been properly authenticated. As a result, perfectly legitimate website emails can be delayed, filtered into spam, or blocked entirely.

This matters because contact form emails are often business critical. For many sites, they are the main route for new enquiries, booking requests, or customer questions. The problem is rarely obvious. Some emails get through, others don’t, and there’s usually no warning when one goes missing. That inconsistency is what makes website email issues so difficult to spot.

The fix isn’t switching contact form plugins or rebuilding the form. The real issue is how the website sends email in the first place. To meet modern email security standards, website emails should be sent through an authenticated email delivery service rather than directly from the server. This is the same approach used by professional email platforms and is far more likely to be trusted by receiving mail systems.

This is where we can help.

At Eldo, regardless of whether you use our website hosting or not, we offer a website email delivery service that sets things up properly and removes the guesswork. We configure your website to send emails using authenticated SMTP or a dedicated email sending service, apply the correct DNS records to your domain, and test delivery to make sure emails are arriving exactly where they should. Once set up, all of your existing forms and automated emails continue to work as normal, just with significantly improved reliability.

Importantly, this does not affect your normal email inbox or how you send emails day to day. It only applies to emails sent from the website itself, such as contact forms, enquiry notifications, and automated messages.

Depending on your setup, we can sometimes use your existing email provider for basic SMTP instead, at no extra cost. We also offer a dedicated email delivery service with improved monitoring and delivery rates. We’ll always recommend the most appropriate option based on how your website is used, rather than pushing a one-size-fits-all solution.

If you’re not sure whether your website emails are being delivered reliably, or you’d rather have it sorted properly and forget about it, just get in touch, and we’ll be happy to help.​