If you are not receiving an email when a donation is made, or your donors are not getting their receipts, the cause is almost always one of a few common things. Charitable includes built-in tools that let you confirm what is happening in a couple of minutes, so please run through the checks below before contacting support.

Quick checklist

Work through these in order. Most email issues are resolved by the first two.

1. Confirm the donation is marked Paid, not Pending.
2. Confirm the notification email is enabled and has a recipient.
3. Run the built-in Email Diagnostics and send a test email.
4. Review Tools > Logs for email errors.
5. Check your spam and trash folders.
6. Test whether your site can send email at all.

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1. Check the donation status

By default, receipts and admin notifications are only sent when a donation is marked Paid. Donations that are still Pending, Failed, orCancelled do not trigger any email. This is the single most common reason an expected email never arrives.

Go to Charitable > Donations and look at the Status column for the donation in question.

• If the donation shows Paid, the email should have been triggered. Move on to the next checks.
• If the donation shows Pending, the payment never fully completed. The email is not broken, the donation simply has not reached a paid state. This usually points to a payment gateway issue, such as a Stripe or PayPal webhook that is not configured, or a donor who left before finishing checkout. Offline donations also stay Pending until you mark them Paid manually.

If your donations are stuck in Pending, that is the issue to solve first. The emails will send once a donation is marked Paid.

2. Confirm the notification is enabled and has a recipient

Go to Charitable > Settings > Emails.

Check the two emails most people are asking about:

• Admin: New Donation Notification is the email that tells you a donation came in.
• Donation Receipt is the email your donor receives.

For each one, make sure it is enabled, then open its settings and confirm the recipient field is filled in. The admin notification defaults to your WordPress administration email address. If that field was cleared or points to an old or mistyped address, the email has nowhere to go.

3. Run the built-in Email Diagnostics

Charitable can test your email system for you and give it a health score.

Go to Charitable > Tools > System Info and scroll down to Email System Diagnostics, then click Run Email Diagnostics.

The report checks that:

• All Charitable email types are registered and can be created.
• Your site is configured to send mail and has a valid sending address.
• Charitable emails have not been globally disabled by another plugin or code snippet.
• The internal hooks that trigger receipts and notifications are active.

Directly below the report is a Send Test Email button. Enter your address and send a test.

• If the test email arrives, your mail system is working and the issue is most likely the donation status (step 1) or the recipient setting (step 2).
• If the test email does not arrive, your site is having a general email delivery problem. Continue to steps 4 and 6.

You can use the Copy option in the diagnostics report to include the results if you do end up contacting support.

4. Review the Logs

Charitable keeps a log that records email failures with the exact reason.

Go to Charitable > Tools > Logs. If logging is turned off, switch Enable Logging on at the top of the page, then make a test donation (or resend an email) so a fresh entry is created.

Use the search box to search for “email” and look for entries such as:

• send failed means your server tried to send the email but the mailer rejected it. This is a delivery problem, see step 6.
• missing components usually means the recipient field is empty, see step 2.
• If you see no email entries at all after a paid donation, the email was never triggered, which again points back to the donation status in step 1.

5. Check your spam and trash folders

Notification and receipt emails can be filtered into Spam or Trash, especially if your site sends from an address that does not match your domain. Check those folders before assuming the email was never sent.

6. Test whether your site can send email at all

If test emails and receipts are both missing, confirm your WordPress site can send any email:

1. Go to your login page (your site address followed by /wp-login.php).
2. Click Lost your password?
3. Enter your email or username and click Get New Password.
4. Check your inbox for the password reset email.

If the password reset email does not arrive either, the problem is not specific to Charitable. Your web host is not reliably sending mail through the default WordPress mailer. The recommended fix is to install a dedicated SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP, which routes your email through a proper mail service and dramatically improves deliverability.

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Still not working?

If you have worked through the steps above and emails still are not sending, contact support and include:

• The Email Diagnostics report (use the Copy button in step 3).
• The status of the donation that should have sent an email.
• Any email-related entries from Tools > Logs (step 4).
• Whether the WordPress password reset test in step 6 succeeded.

That information lets us pinpoint the cause on the first reply.

Still have questions? We’re here to help!

• Submit a Support Ticket
• Contact Us