Every test sends one email from the site, through its normal mail setup, to our test inbox. The report then checks five things about how that email arrived. Click the Last test badge beside a site to see its latest report, or Test history for earlier ones. Test results are kept for 90 days.
The overall result
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pass | The email arrived and every check passed. |
| Warning | The email arrived, but something could stop the site's emails reaching inboxes, now or later. |
| Fail | The email didn't arrive, or arrived in a way that means real emails are likely to be lost or sent to junk. |
| Waiting | The site has sent the email and we're waiting for it, for up to 15 minutes. |
| Not run | We couldn't reach the site, so no email was sent. The Website Connection column shows why. |
The overall result is the worst of the five checks below, so a single failed check fails the whole test.
A failed test, or one we couldn't run because the site was unreachable, sends you an alert. Warnings don't: the emails are still arriving, so a warning is something to fix soon rather than an emergency, and an alert after every test until it's fixed would bury the real failures. Instead, each new warning is listed once: in your daily summary on the Agency plan, or in a weekly email on other plans. See Alerts and channels.
The five checks
Delivered
Whether the email arrived, and how long it took.
- WordPress couldn't send the email (fail): the site's mail system reported an error. The report shows the error and the mail plugin in use. Usually the SMTP host, port or password is wrong, or has expired.
- The email never arrived (fail): WordPress sent it, but it didn't reach us within 15 minutes. The host may be blocking outgoing email, or a mail server rejected it. Sending through an email service (such as SES, Postmark or Google Workspace) with an SMTP plugin usually fixes this.
- Delivered, but it took… (warning): it arrived, but took more than 5 minutes, usually because it was queued or retried on the way. Password resets and other time-sensitive emails may arrive late.
Spam placement
Whether our inbox's spam filter flagged the email (fail). If it did, mailbox providers are likely to put the site's emails in junk too. The usual causes are missing SPF, DKIM or DMARC, or the sending server's reputation.
SPF
SPF is a DNS record listing the servers allowed to send email for a domain.
- SPF failed (fail): the server that sent the email isn't in the domain's SPF record. Add the sending service to it.
- SPF not set up (warning): there's no SPF record covering that server, so receivers can't confirm it was allowed to send.
DKIM
DKIM is a signature that proves the email came from the domain it says, and wasn't changed on the way.
- DKIM signature invalid (fail): the email was signed, but the signature didn't check out. The DKIM record in DNS is usually wrong or out of date.
- Not signed with DKIM (warning): send through an email service that signs email for the domain, and add the DKIM records it gives you.
DMARC
DMARC tells receivers what to do with email that fails SPF and DKIM for the From domain. To pass, SPF or DKIM must pass and match the From domain.
- DMARC fails with a reject or quarantine policy (fail): the domain tells receivers to reject the site's emails, or send them to junk, and they will.
- DMARC fails (policy: none) (warning): receivers are told not to act on it yet, but it still hurts delivery, and a stricter policy later would block these emails.
- No DMARC record (warning): Gmail and Yahoo expect one from senders. Start with a policy of
nonewhile you check everything passes.
Other things a report can show
- WordPress took a while to send: a note from 3 seconds, and a warning from 6 seconds. Visitors wait this long whenever the site sends email, such as on contact forms and checkouts. If the site doesn't reply within 30 seconds, that's a warning too. The SMTP server or email service is usually slow to respond.
- Virus detected (fail): the test email is plain text with no attachments, so a flagged attachment means something on the site is changing outgoing emails. Scan the site for malware straight away.
- The test headers were removed on the way: normal when a mail plugin sends through an email service's API. It doesn't affect delivery.
- Not judged: our test inbox had a problem: a problem on our side, not the site's. The next test checks again.