Elementor form confirmation email (Email 2) not sending: how to set it up and fix it

Elementor Pro sends the confirmation through the Email 2 action when its To field holds the shortcode of the email field. It reaches the inbox only if it is sent from your own domain through a service that signs it. If Email 2 is set up correctly and still does not arrive, the cause is most often the last part: the visitor’s mailbox provider does not trust unauthenticated mail and files it as spam or rejects it.

Your own notification (the Email action) can work perfectly while Email 2 fails, because the two emails go to very different mailboxes. This guide shows the Email 2 settings that matter, explains why this email fails more often, and fixes the sending side.

Email and Email 2: what is the difference

Both are the same kind of action. Each one sends one email and has its own settings. Elementor describes Email 2 as the action you normally use to send a message to the visitor who submitted the form.

Email 2 has its own settings. A correct Email action tells you nothing about it, so check Email 2 separately.

Why Email 2 fails more often than Email 1

Both emails use the same WordPress function, wp_mail(). Elementor’s own help pages say that the web host then processes and sends the message. Four things make the confirmation email the weaker one.

• The recipient is a stranger’s mailbox. Your notification goes to a mailbox you control, usually on your own domain, that you have never marked as spam. Email 2 goes to whatever the visitor typed: Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, iCloud or a company server with its own filters. None of them has any history with your website, so they judge the email only by how it is authenticated and how it looks.
• It is usually sent without authentication. Mail sent by the web server’s PHP mail function is normally not DKIM-signed, and the server may not be listed in your domain’s SPF record. Google’s sender guidelines ask every sender to set up SPF or DKIM, and ask anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC with the From domain matching one of them. Google says mail that does not meet its requirements might not be delivered as expected or might be marked as spam. Elementor’s help pages give the same warning about form emails. See SPF vs DKIM vs DMARC for what each record does.
• The From address belongs to a free mail provider. Site owners without a mailbox on their domain often type their Gmail or Yahoo address into From Email. Your site cannot sign mail for those domains, and receivers check the policy of the domain in the From address. When we checked DNS while writing this, yahoo.com and aol.com both published a DMARC policy of reject. Google’s guidelines also tell senders not to impersonate Gmail From addresses. Using the visitor’s own address as From fails for the same reason; see why a form must not send from the visitor’s email.
• A failure looks like success. The visitor sees the form’s success message, and WordPress counts the email as sent once the server accepts it. Nothing tells you that Gmail put it in spam later. Notification problems get noticed because leads stop arriving. Confirmation problems get noticed when a customer says they never heard back.

So the fix has two parts. First set up Email 2 correctly (steps 1 to 4). Then make sure the email is sent in a way mailbox providers accept (steps 5 and 6).

Step 1: check the email field and its ID

Elementor requires an Email field in the form for Email 2 to reach the visitor. Edit the page with Elementor, click the form, and open Content → Form Fields. Click the Email field, turn on Required, then open its Advanced tab.

The ID there is what the shortcode uses. For a default form it is email, so the shortcode is [field id="email"]. If you renamed the field, or the form has more than one email field, use the shortcode that the Advanced tab shows. Marking the field as required makes sure the To field of Email 2 is never empty.

Step 2: add Email 2 under Actions After Submit

1. In the same panel, expand Actions After Submit.
2. Collect Submissions and Email are listed by default. Keep both. Collect Submissions saves every entry under Elementor → Submissions, so a message is never lost even if an email fails.
3. Click the + sign and choose Email 2 from the list.
4. Open the Email 2 section that appears below.

Newer Elementor versions also have an Atomic Form element with an Email 2 (Pro) action. Its labels differ a little (Send to instead of To, Email subject instead of Subject). This guide follows the classic Form widget, so check Elementor’s Atomic Form page for how to address the submitter there.

Step 3: fill in the Email 2 settings

These are the settings to use for a plain-text confirmation:

To:          [field id="email"]
Subject:     We received your message
Message:     Hi [field id="name"], thanks for contacting us.
             We will reply within one working day.
From Email:  [email protected]
From Name:   Your Business Name
Reply-To:    [email protected]
Send As:     Plain Text

• To: delete the default address and paste the email field’s shortcode. Elementor says the shortcode must be written exactly as it appears in the field’s Advanced tab. Copy it from there instead of typing it, and do not copy it from a web page, where quotation marks can turn into curly ones, which may stop it matching.
• From Email: an address on your website’s domain, and on the same domain your mail service signs for (step 6). Elementor’s own troubleshooting page also says to use the same domain as your website.
• Reply-To: an inbox you read. If you copied the settings from Email, this may still hold the visitor’s address, and then the visitor’s reply goes back to the visitor.
• Message: only shortcodes from the Advanced tab of a form field work here. A shortcode from another plugin causes a server error, according to Elementor. Use Send As → HTML if you want formatting; a short plain-text message is also fine.

Step 4: protect the form from spam

Email 2 sends to whatever address is typed into the form. Without spam protection, bots can enter other people’s addresses and your site will email them. That harms your domain’s reputation, and it is one reason confirmation emails end up in spam. Add a reCAPTCHA field (Elementor has a help page for this) or a Honeypot field to the form, and keep the message short and fixed.

Step 5: see what the visitor’s mailbox did

Update the page, then submit the live form with a Gmail address you own. Look in the inbox and the Spam folder.

• In Spam, or in the inbox with a warning: open the message, click the three dots, and choose Show original. Gmail lists the results for SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Anything other than PASS is a sending-side problem. Reading the result is covered in contact form emails not reaching Gmail; for Microsoft mailboxes see contact form emails not reaching Outlook.
• Nowhere at all, but the entry is under Elementor → Submissions: the form works and the email step is failing. See form submissions are saved but no email arrives.
• No other WordPress email arrives either (try a password reset): your server cannot send mail at all. See why wp_mail() stops working.

Step 6: send through an authenticated mail service

Elementor’s help pages recommend routing form emails through an external mail service instead of the hosting server. They suggest Elementor’s own Site Mailer and also list an SMTP server as an option. Any service that signs mail for your own domain solves this. The steps are the same whichever you choose:

1. Create an account with a mail service and add your website’s domain as a sending domain.
2. Add the DNS records it shows you, normally a DKIM record and sometimes SPF, at your DNS host. Wait until the service marks the domain as verified.
3. Connect WordPress to the service with its plugin, or with an SMTP plugin using port 587 (STARTTLS) or 465 (SSL/TLS), so wp_mail() goes through it.
4. Set From Email in Email and Email 2 to an address on that verified domain.
5. Publish a DMARC record for the domain if you do not have one. Start with p=none and tighten it later.

How SecureSMTP does this. The WordPress plugin connects in a few minutes and routes wp_mail(), and so every Elementor Email and Email 2, through SecureSMTP, from your own domain with DKIM signing. You verify the domain by adding DNS records (see Domains and DNS), and each confirmation then shows in the email log with its delivery status. The Free plan covers 5,000 emails a month, 1 site and 1 sending domain; paid plans start at $7 a month. More on the Elementor forms SMTP page.

Confirm it works

1. Submit the live form three times, with an address at Gmail, one at Outlook.com or Hotmail, and one on a different domain. Each confirmation should arrive in the inbox within a minute, not in Spam.
2. Press Reply on one of them. The reply should go to the inbox you set in Reply-To.
3. In Gmail, use Show original. SPF, DKIM and DMARC should all say PASS, and the domain in the DKIM signature should be your own.
4. Check the email log of your sending service. Each confirmation should show as delivered. Then submit once with a mistyped address; the bounce should show up there too. With SecureSMTP both appear in the email log.
5. Open Elementor → Submissions and make sure all test entries are saved.

For the rest of your site’s email, the email deliverability checklist lists what else to check.

Frequently asked questions