Does it work for email accounts hosted by third party hosts e.g. Private Email?

Hi I’m not entirely clear what you mean by “Private Email Subscription from Namecheap”

The plugin works with the native php mail from your host ( unless you have specifically install an SMTP plugin or a transactional mail plugin like Mialgun or Sendgrid )

Getting to the bottom of deliverability issues is a complex and time consuming activity.

There are several tools you can use e.g. mxtoolbox(dot)com ( run your server IP address through that first ) and also spam checkers like isnotspam(dot)com that you can use to help work out what is going wrong.

In some cases it may be best to give up with local phpmail and switch to an SMTP or transactional mail servuce, especially if your doamin is hosted on a larged shared service where the IP reputation could be damaged.

Thanks for your reply.

Private Email is a premium dedicated email hosting service offered by my domain name registrar Namecheap. Private Email hosts one email account of my domain name for a small fee ($11.88/yr).

The first website you suggested was useful. It returned an error and a warning:
– No DMARC Record found (<– this was marked as red)
– DMARC Quarantine/Reject policy not enabled (<– this was marked as orange)

For the benefit of anyone in a similar situation, here are a few things that I did to ‘fix’ the problem…

In my webhosting cpanel, under Advanced MX Editor, both remote server MX records MX1 and MX2 were set to the Private Email server mail.privateemail.com, but the email routing was set to “Automatically Detect Configuration (recommended)”, so I changed it to “Remote Mail Exchanger”.

Re-ran the smpt test and the email test website showed a lot more results as passed (green). But I still get two orange warning results:
– SMTP Reverse DNS Mismatch: Reverse DNS does not contain the hostname
– SMTP Banner Check: Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner

I tried using the 5-star rated wp plugin My SMTP WP, but it only worked when sending to gmail. Some emails still went to hotmail junk, so uninstalled it.

I saw an improvement after setting my sender name to my own full name rather than my website name. Perhaps it makes emails look more trustworthy.

I also went into my recipient Hotmail junk folder and click “not junk” for every junked email from my site. No noticeable difference.

Best result was when I disabled the account registration emails from woocommerce, so that only the remaining two emails get triggered: the course product purchase receipt from woocommerce and a course registration confirmation/welcome email from learndash LMS. So it’s 2 out of 2 going to inbox.

Wow, thank you for your comprehensive analysis. I’m sure it will help many with a similar problem.

Thanks