Ultimate Member Emails Not Sending (Activation and Password Reset)
Ultimate Member can tell a new member an activation email was sent when it never created one. Here is how to switch the activation email on and resend it, find which setting stopped the email, and tell that apart from an email lost after it left your site.
Ultimate Member emails not sending? Someone signs up, your site tells them to click the activation link “in the email we just sent you”, and no email comes. They try to log in anyway and get “Your account is awaiting email verification.”
So you check spam, then click resend in your users list. The screen says the activation email “has been sent”. Still nothing, and your new member stays locked out.
You didn’t break anything, and this is fixable. Here’s how to switch the activation email on and resend it, find out whether Ultimate Member ever created that email, and fix whichever half failed.
Switch the activation email on, then resend it to waiting members
On a new install, the Account Activation Email is switched off. Until it’s on, the resend link has nothing to send. No worries, the fix is one tickbox.
One warning before you resend: leave approved members alone. Their link reads “Send activation email”, and clicking it sets them back to “Waiting email confirmation”.
- Go to Ultimate Member > Settings and open the Emails tab.
- On the Account Activation Email row, click Manage.
- Under Enable/Disable, tick Enable this email notification and click Save Changes. Back on the list, the row’s status icon reads “Enabled” when you hover over it.
- Go to Users > All Users. On each member whose status is “Waiting email confirmation”, click Resend activation email.
Don’t go by the notice. “Activation email for 1 user has been sent” appears even with the email switched off and nothing created.
That’s it. If the resent email arrives, you’re done. If the switch was already on, or the email still doesn’t come, keep going: the rest of this page finds out why.
Check the Ultimate Member settings that stop an email before WordPress sees it
Ultimate Member decides whether to create each email before WordPress is asked to send anything. When a setting says no, the email is skipped and no screen tells you.
The email’s own switch is off
Every email on the Emails tab has its own switch, and on a new install six of the 14 start off. Four go to members: Account Activation Email, Your account is pending review, Account Approved Email and Account Rejected Email. Two go to admins: Account Needs Review Notification and Account Deletion Notification.
Turn on each one your site relies on.
The role’s Registration Status doesn’t match the email
Go to Ultimate Member > User Roles, click the role new members get (Subscriber, unless Registration Default Role under Ultimate Member > Settings > General > Users says otherwise), and find Registration Status in the Registration Options panel.
It starts on “Auto Approve”, which lets members straight in with no activation email. The trap is choosing “Require Email Activation” while the Account Activation Email is still off: the member is told an email was sent, and none is created.
Email sending by Action Scheduler is holding your email in a queue
Go to Ultimate Member > Settings > Advanced > Features and find Email sending by Action Scheduler. Its box starts unticked. When it’s ticked, every Ultimate Member email waits in a queue for your site’s background tasks.
On our test install (not a real web host, so yours may differ), queued email went out about a minute later. With WordPress’s scheduled tasks (WP-Cron) disabled, it waited until we opened wp-admin. The queue holds every Ultimate Member email, so if admin notices arrive and only the activation email is missing, look elsewhere.
To test it, untick the box, save, and register a test member: the email then goes out straight away. Queued email shows under Tools > Scheduled Actions, but “Complete” there doesn’t mean sent: an email WordPress failed to send shows it too.
Admin notices need commas in Admin Email Address
On the Emails tab, under Email sender options, Admin Email Address takes several addresses separated by commas. A semicolon between two addresses stops the notice for everyone. An invalid address is skipped while the rest get theirs.
Password reset emails only go to approved members
Ultimate Member’s Password Reset page says the same thing whoever asks: “If an account matching the provided details exists, we will send a password reset link.” Only approved members get the “Reset your password” email, and a member still waiting on activation gets none.
That’s a setting: Ultimate Member > Settings > Access > Other, Only approved user Reset Password, ticked on a new install. So get that member their activation email first, with the steps at the top of this page.
A free mail log shows whether Ultimate Member created the email
A mail log lists every email WordPress is asked to send, so one test registration shows whether Ultimate Member handed the activation email over. You’ve got this:
- Install and activate WP Mail Logging, a free plugin. It logs email only from the time it’s active.
- Untick Email sending by Action Scheduler if it’s ticked (a queued email has no row in the log yet), then register a test member with an email address you can check.
- Go to WP Mail Logging > Email Log and look for a row with your test address under Receiver and “Please activate your account” under Subject.
| What the log shows | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| No row for the member, with the queue box unticked | Ultimate Member never created the email. | Go back to the settings above. |
| Text in the Error column | WordPress tried to send the email and couldn’t. | Fix the sending side, below. |
| An empty Error column, but no email | WordPress accepted the email. The log can’t see further. | Check spam, then fix the sending side. |
When the log shows the email and it still never arrives, fix the sending side
A row in the log means Ultimate Member did its part. It hands each email to WordPress and never checks the result, so it can’t warn you. Many web hosts block or throttle the email WordPress sends through them, and email sent straight from a web server often lacks SPF and DKIM authentication, the DNS records that prove an email really came from your domain.
That’s the problem we built SendWP for, so it’s what we’d suggest. SendWP sends your WordPress email in place of your web host. Ultimate Member sends its email the standard WordPress way, so there’s no Ultimate Member setting to change.
It’s a paid service. Here’s how to install the SendWP plugin and connect it:
- Go to Plugins > Add Plugin, search for SendWP, click Install Now, then Activate.
- In the notice at the top of your dashboard, click Connect or register.
- On the Tools > SendWP screen, click Connect to SendWP, then register or log in and follow the prompts to connect. Until it’s connected, the plugin sends nothing.
- Register a test member again and check that inbox.
Get your Ultimate Member emails sending again
You started with members locked out and a screen insisting the email “has been sent”. Now you can tell an email Ultimate Member never created from one that went missing afterwards, and where to fix each. Check the settings first: SendWP can’t switch an email on or empty a queue for you.
If the log shows the email and it still doesn’t arrive, here’s what SendWP changes: once the plugin is connected, your activation emails, password resets and admin notices go out through SendWP instead of your web host, along with every other email WordPress sends. You install one plugin, connect it in a few clicks, and leave your Ultimate Member settings as they are. We believe it’s the best way to get your members’ email sending again, and you can get started for $1 your first month.
