The email is sent to the email address at Settings > General in your site’s Dashboard.
If you did not receive the email, and it’s a valid email address, it sounds like your hosting provider has disabled PHP’s mail() function, which WordPress uses to send you email notifications and is also used by contact form plugins and more.
This is a common safeguard employed by hosting providers when they suspect that another customer on the same server is sending spam emails directly from the server.
Another alternative is that PHP’s mail() function is still active, but spammer activity from the server has already caused any email sent from it to be blocklisted. This would result in the emails being sent but never received by any email address with basic anti-spam capabilities.
You can check this by leaving a comment on your site and checking if you receive an email. Another alternative would be to use the Health Check plugin and send yourself a test email from the plugin’s Tools tab to see if it works.
If you didn’t receive a test email, you could try using an SMTP plugin to configure your WordPress site to use your email’s outgoing mail server instead of PHP’s mail() function.
As for the error, this problem may be a plugin or theme conflict. Please attempt to deactivate all plugins and switch to the default Twenty Twenty-One theme. If the problem goes away, re-activate them one by one to identify the source of the problem.
If you can install plugins, install Health Check. On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to deactivate all plugins and change the theme for you while you’re still logged in without affecting normal visitors to your site.
