Hello,

Could you please let me know if you’re receiving any error messages? Can you please post the output of this command? It will check if your Droplet is able to communicate over the ports required to send emails externally:

nc -vz smtp.gmail.com 25

Some accounts have SMTP blocked default due to abuse and the output will help us to see if you’re having this issue.

Looking forward to your reply.

In case anyone else gets here via Google, you have to install sendmail:

https://www.postmm.com/web-development/how-to-set-up-wordpress-on-digital-ocean/

apt-get install sendmail 

Test it by running:

echo "email body" > mail.txt
echo "Subject: hello" | sendmail -v RECIPIENT@gmail.com < mail.txt

^change “RECIPIENT@gmail.com” to your email address for testing.

While it’s sending check the status messages. The Google server may block the email from going through because it thinks it’s spam. Going through the fun process of setting up SPF and DKIM now…

Hello all,

What I could suggest here is using an SMTP plugin for your WordPress site.

That way you will be able to specify an SMTP server with authentication which your emails would be going through. You could for example use Gmail’s SMTP settings. This would drastically increase the delivery rate of your emails as well compared to using plain PHP mail.

I’ve been using this plugin for a while now and it works very well: Easy WP SMTP

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex