--- title: "Your website's contact form isn't sending you the emails: how to spot it before you lose another customer" description: "Your website's contact form isn't sending you the emails and you only find out when a customer complains. Six real causes and how to check in ten minutes." date: "2026-10-29" category: "Websites for business" keywords: "contact form not sending email, not receiving messages from my website, website form goes to spam, fix contact form, form emails not arriving" portada: "/portadas/portada-formulario-web-no-llega-el-correo.webp" --- A physiotherapist in Vecindario showed me her website a few months ago. She was happy with it: good-looking, fast, with her photo and her opening hours properly placed. I asked how many messages she got a month through the form and she said two or three. We opened the mailbox she had configured and there were 31 unread messages in the spam folder from the last four months. Thirty-one people who had written asking for an appointment and never got an answer. It's the most expensive and most silent failure a website can have: the form is submitted, the page says "message sent", the customer feels reassured and the email never arrives. No error, no warning, nothing broken. It simply disappears. And almost nobody finds out until a customer, annoyed, phones to ask why you aren't replying. These are the six causes behind it, in order of frequency, and what to do about each one. ## 1. The email leaves the hosting without authentication This is cause number one by a wide margin. Most websites send the form using the server's own mail function. That delivery isn't signed: Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook receive a message that claims to come from your domain but can't prove it, so they send it to spam or reject it outright. The fix is to send through a provider's SMTP with **SPF and DKIM** configured on the domain: the professional email you pay for, or a transactional sending service. It's half an hour of work and it costs nothing on the usual free plans. ## 2. The "reply to" field is set wrong Many websites send the email "from" the form's own address instead of the customer's. The message reaches you, you hit reply and you write to yourself. The result: you answer, but the customer receives nothing and you think they do. It's fixed by putting the customer's address in the `Reply-To` field. One line of code, and it avoids conversations lost for weeks. ## 3. The message goes to an account that no longer exists It happens more than it seems. The site was built with the email of the cousin who helped, the partner who left or a test account deleted years ago. The send works, the email bounces and nobody looks at the bounces. You have to check the destination address in the code and in the site's admin panel, not trust what you remember. And if that account exists but nobody opens it, it's the same as if it didn't. ## 4. The form sends nothing, but says it did Here the failure is sillier and harder to see: the button animates, the success message appears, and the request to the server failed along the way (an error, a changed route, an expired mail service). The website lies without meaning to, and the customer is reassured too. Without error logs it's invisible. You spot it by filling in the form yourself from your phone, with an email that isn't yours. ## 5. The hosting limit or a full mailbox Cheap hosting plans limit how many emails can be sent per hour. A day with more traffic than usual — a campaign, a trade fair, a bit of news — and the sends are blocked silently until the next hour. The messages from that window are lost and don't come back. The same happens with a mailbox that fills up: new emails bounce and the sender doesn't always find out. ## 6. The customer typed their address wrong Less frequent, but it happens: a swapped letter, a `.con` instead of `.com`, a phone number one digit short. If the message only exists as an email, that contact is lost forever. If it's also stored on the website, you can call and get it back. ## How to check it in ten minutes 1. Fill in your own form with an address that is **not** yours. Do it twice: once with Gmail and once with Hotmail, which filter differently. 2. Look in the spam folder, the promotions tab and the trash, not just the inbox. 3. Check the sent folder of the account the website uses, if it exists. 4. Ask whoever built the site to confirm which address the email leaves from and through which provider. 5. If the site has an admin panel or a database, check whether your test message is stored there. If it isn't, the form stores nothing. 6. Reply to the email that arrives. If the reply goes to your own address, the "reply to" is set wrong. ## What any contact form should do - **Store every message** in a database or an admin panel, even if the email fails. It's the only real safety net. - **Send through authenticated SMTP** with the domain signed (SPF and DKIM). - **Put the customer's email in the "reply to"** so answering is one click. - **Confirm to the customer** with an automatic acknowledgement: it cuts phone calls and proves the circuit works. - **Warn when it fails**: if the send doesn't go out, the visitor has to see it and have a phone number to call. - **Ask for consent** with an unticked box and a link to the privacy policy. That last point isn't a detail. A form that collects name, phone and email without a consent box or a legal link is a data protection problem, and the fine can cost a lot more than the whole website. I explain it calmly in [legal notice, privacy and cookies on your website](/blog/en/aviso-legal-privacidad-y-cookies-de-tu-web). ## What this failure costs in euros Do the maths with your own numbers. If your website gets 15 messages a month and you lose four along the way — two in spam, one in a bounce, one never stored — and your average customer is worth €30, that's €120 a month. Fourteen hundred a year, for a failure nobody sees and nobody complains about, because whoever doesn't get an answer simply goes to a competitor. Fixing it, in most cases, costs zero euros in services and one afternoon of work. The hard part isn't the solution: it's finding out the problem exists. If you like, you can start with the basics and check whether your website really works with [this checklist](/blog/en/como-saber-si-mi-web-funciona). And if you'd rather have someone who builds websites every month look at it, with the sending already tested and the messages stored from day one, you can [request a free design proposal](/solicita-web/en) and I'll tell you in two days what your form has and what I'd change.