Blogs not emailing
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Any idea or help as to why sometimes my posted blogs go automatically to my email subscribers but sometimes they don’t? So frustrating!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there!
Can you please confirm if you mean that some posts don’t send notifications to anyone, while some posts send notifications, or if you mean that post notifications are not sent to some subscribers only?
If it’s the latter, you can follow the instructions here to see what’s causing that: Notifications to subscribers.
If it’s the former, please confirm if you already have notifications sent out to your subscribers enabled within the post:
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The issue is that sometimes my posts automatically email subscribers but sometimes they don’t. I don’t see an option to “enable” posts by email.
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When you say that sometimes the posts do not email subscribers, where are you seeing this happening exactly? Once we get more information we can look into this further for you.
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Hi there,
To look into this properly, we need a few more details:
- How are you finding out that emails aren’t going out? Are subscribers telling you directly, or are you subscribed to your own blog and not receiving the emails yourself?
- Can you share the URLs of two or three specific posts that you believe did not send email notifications? Knowing which posts worked and which didn’t will help us spot a pattern.
- When you publish, are these always brand-new posts? Email notifications are only sent when a post is first published. If a post was previously published, saved as a draft, then republished; or moved from private to public; or if an already-published post was updated, a notification will not be sent again.
While we wait for those details, please check the following:
- Go to your site’s dashboard → Settings → Newsletter and confirm that email sending is enabled and not toggled off.
- On the same page, check whether newsletter categories are in use. If they are, make sure the category your posts are published under is included. Since your posts appear to be filed under
Uncategorized, that category would need to be enabled there.
For reference, here is our full troubleshooting guide for subscriber email delivery:
https://wordpress.com/support/troubleshooting-not-receiving-notification-emails/As for the per-post toggle you mentioned not seeing: when publishing a new post in the block editor, a “Send email to subscribers” option appears in the pre-publish sidebar before you hit Publish. If you are using the classic editor, that toggle is not available in the same place; email sending is controlled at the site level through the Newsletter settings linked above.
Let us know the answers to those questions and we can dig further.
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Thank you so much for the reply. To answer your questions:
1. I know they sometimes don’t email because yes, I subscribe to my own blog and don’t always receive them via email.
2. The following two blogs did send emails:
Smells Like a Winner to Me
Irish Eyes are Smiling
The following one did not send an email. Dates of these three blogs spanned only 10 days.
Cross My Heart
3. Yes, when I publish a blog it’s always a brand new post.
I tried going to my site’s dashboard per your advice but I don’t see any option for “Newsletter” under Settings. I am publishing in Classic Editor as I like it better than Block Editor and like the consistency of the same look for the many years I’ve been with you.
Thank you so much!
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Thank you for those details and for confirming that these are always brand-new posts. That helps rule out a few things.
I looked at the three posts you mentioned and noticed something worth flagging. “Cross My Heart” actually appears three times on your site with slightly different URLs:
carlawordsmithblog.com/2026/03/27/cross-my-heart/carlawordsmithblog.com/2026/03/27/cross-my-heart-2/carlawordsmithblog.com/2026/03/27/cross-my-heart-3/
The
-2and-3at the end mean WordPress detected a duplicate title and auto-generated a unique URL for each. This pattern shows up on several other posts as well, including “Irish Eyes Are Smiling” (which is on version-5), “Don’t Look This Gift Horse in the Mouth,” “What a Saint,” and others.Having multiple copies of the same post published is something worth cleaning up regardless — it can confuse search engines and clutter your site — but it may not be the sole cause of the missing emails, since “Irish Eyes Are Smiling” did send an email despite also having duplicates.
Before we dig further, I need you to check two things:
- Visit your Newsletter settings. Since you use the Classic Editor and WP Admin dashboard, the path in your dashboard is Jetpack → Newsletter. You can also go directly here:
https://wordpress.com/settings/newsletter/carlawordsmithblog.com
Once there, confirm the following:
- Under the “Email” section, make sure email sending is not toggled off.
- If “Newsletter categories” are enabled, make sure
Uncategorizedis included, since all your posts are filed under that category.
- Run a quick test for us. Write a brand-new post from scratch using Posts → Add New. Give it a title you have never used before (something like “Test Post Please Ignore” is fine). Publish it once and do not trash it, duplicate it, or re-publish it. Then check whether you receive the subscriber email. Let us know the result and the URL of that test post.
This will tell us whether the issue is with your site’s email delivery in general, or whether it is specific to certain posts. Once we know that, we can narrow it down further.
As a side note, if you ever spot an error in a post after publishing, the best approach is to edit the existing post rather than creating a new one. The email will already have been sent at that point, so correcting the live post is safe and your subscribers will see the updated version if they click through from the email.
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Also, can you let us know which email address you are subscribed to your blog with? This will let us check our email logs on our end to see whether the notification for “Cross My Heart” was sent and what happened to it.
If you would prefer to keep this confidential, just email us at help@wordpress.com and cite this forum thread.
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I use my (email visible only to moderators and staff) email for my blog.
I went to Jetpack to Newsletter and found the options…which were a bit confusing. Is the brown toggle “on” or is the black one? I toggled the brown one on.
I sent a test blog per your suggestion. I’ve not received an email on it.
As for the multiple blogs…yes…that was me. I tried a few times to send the blog again to see if I ever got an email. Never did. Sorry for the confusion!
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Good news and a bit of a twist here.
I checked our email delivery logs for your account. The notification emails for “Cross My Heart” were actually sent — three times in fact, once for each version you published. All three were accepted by your email provider’s servers (sbcglobal.net uses Yahoo’s mail infrastructure behind the scenes).
However, here’s the important part: Yahoo accepting an email doesn’t guarantee it reaches your inbox. Yahoo (and Microsoft/Outlook) are known to sometimes silently discard or spam-filter emails from services like WordPress.com, even after their servers confirm receipt. This is a long-standing issue with these providers and is unfortunately outside our control. Our own troubleshooting guide acknowledges this and recommends testing with a different provider like Gmail when Yahoo isn’t delivering reliably.
So the “Cross My Heart” notification was sent successfully on our end — Yahoo just didn’t pass it along to you. To address this going forward:
- Check your Yahoo Spam/Junk/Bulk folder for emails from WordPress.com or “Beyond Words.” If you find any, mark them as “Not Spam” to train Yahoo to deliver future messages.
- Add
(email visible only to moderators and staff)to your Yahoo contacts — this can help prevent filtering. - Consider subscribing with a Gmail address as a more reliable alternative. Gmail is much more consistent at delivering WordPress.com notifications. You can subscribe to your own blog with a free Gmail account and use that to confirm post emails are going out, while keeping your sbcglobal address for everything else.
Now, regarding the test post you just published: I checked the logs and no notification email was generated for it at all. This is separate from the Yahoo issue — it means the email was never sent in the first place. I believe this is related to the Newsletter toggle you mentioned adjusting. When you said you “toggled the brown one on,” you may have inadvertently switched email sending off rather than on.
Could you go back to Jetpack → Newsletter (or use this direct link: https://wordpress.com/settings/newsletter/carlawordsmithblog.com) and send me a screenshot of your current settings? That way I can confirm whether email sending is currently enabled or disabled and walk you through the correct configuration.
Once we get that sorted, you can publish another quick test post and we can verify the email goes out.
One more thing: I noticed you have several duplicate posts on your site (the
-2,-3versions of “Cross My Heart” and others). While these did not cause the email issue, they do clutter your site and can confuse search engines. When you have a moment, you can go to Posts → All Posts and trash the duplicate entries, keeping only the version you want live. -
Ok…I went to my Yahoo spam and found them. Marked them as not spam and also added the wordpress address to my contacts. Now trying to find how to send you my screenshot that I have on my desktop
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Also…I have a gmail address that I mostly use. My Yahoo/SBC one is old but was what I used when I set up my blog
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Hey @carlawordsmithblog!
Thank you for confirming! I’m happy to see we’re making progress on this one.
Now, regarding the last post notification, could you let us know if using the Gmail address instead of the current one helps with the notification, please?
Also, if you’d like to troubleshoot specific email addresses, please let us know at help@wordpress.com and we’ll be happy to do so.
Best,
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Thank you! A few questions:
- Are my toggle switches in the right position to email blogs per my screenshot?
- How do I change my email address on my blog to my gmail account?
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I can see your screenshot now, and the toggle for “Email new posts to subscribers by default” is in the correct position – ON (orange, slid to the right). That’s the one that matters for sending emails to your subscribers.
The other toggles below under “Subscriptions” control whether subscription forms show up on your site, so those won’t affect email delivery.
Since that toggle is currently ON, the reason your test post didn’t send an email was likely because the toggle was in the OFF position at the time you published it. It sounds like it may have gotten switched around when you were exploring those settings.
Could you publish one quicker test post now and let me know if the email comes through? That will confirm everything is working as expected going forward.
For changing your blog email to your Gmail account, here’s how:
- Go to your account settings page: https://wordpress.com/me/account
- In the “Email address” field, replace your current address with your Gmail address
- Click “Save account settings”
- Check your Gmail inbox for a confirmation email from WordPress.com (check spam just in case)
- Click the confirmation link in that email to finalize the change
Once confirmed, Gmail becomes your login email and all WordPress.com notifications will go there instead. This will also help avoid the Yahoo spam filtering issue you ran into.
Here’s the full guide for reference: https://wordpress.com/support/email-address/
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Okay, I did all of the above. I changed my email address to my gmail one and sent a test blog. I have not received an email on it tho.
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Hi Carla,
I checked on our end and can confirm that no email was generated for either of your test posts. Your settings are correct and your site is in good standing to send emails, so that’s not the issue.
What I noticed is that both test posts were published without any content in the body. The email notification system requires actual content in a post before it sends it out to subscribers – it won’t send an empty post.
Could you try one more test? This time, write a post with a couple of paragraphs of text (it can be anything, even placeholder text), then publish it. That should trigger the email to your new Gmail address. Once it arrives, you can trash the test post.
Also, make sure to check your Gmail spam and promotions tabs just in case, since this will be the first WordPress.com notification going to that address.
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Yay…it worked! I got the email once I entered content in the post. Thank you so much for all your help and for your patience. You have been the best!
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