In many cases, email sent from forms in WordPress on does not make it to the Inbox of Google GMail addresses.

Note: Unfortunately, we at CharlesWorks do not have any control over how Google or any other email provider chooses to filter email on their systems. If the instructions here do not fit or you are unable to determine how to solve the problem, you must contact support at Google for answers.

Google’s GMail has no “safe sender list”. However, adding an email address to a GMail account’s contact list should suffice. GMail will deliver messages from addresses in one’s contacts list to the inbox, unless Google knows with high confidence that a message is spam.

Web form’s email format

You will need to know the email address your particular WordPress form sends email to in order to add it to your Google mail contact list. There are many forms used with the WordPress platform. Those forms and WordPress itself may use different formats. Here are some common formats we have seen used on WordPress installations on CharlesWorks servers:

• wordpress@yourdomain.com – used with messages informing you about comments (an indication that a post or page has the ability to leave comments turned on) and some other WordPress administrative messages or notifications sent from your website.
• mail@yourdomain.com – used with forms of many kinds – we’ve noticed in particular that Divi forms generate the email in this format.
• username@yourdomain.com – some report output messages (messages from your website to inform you about site information like web stats and so on) as well as forms use the Linux username at your domain – if you are a CharlesWorks web client and you do not know your Linux username, email us and we will be happy to supply that info.

How to add to Google contacts:

• Click on the big Gmail top right and select Contacts.
• Click on the New Contact button on the left.
• Fill in the contact’s name (like “Website Form”) and email address (in the format as indicated above).

More on Filtering if the Messages go to Spam

Create a filter so the messages from the sender are never sent to Spam like this:

• Open up the message in Spam
• From the drop-down next to the reply button, click on Filter messages like this
• In the page that appears, click on Create a filter with this search link
• In the next page, check the box next to Never send to Spam
• Click on the blue Create filter button