Troubleshooting
Application notification emails are not arriving
Nearly always the site’s mail configuration rather than the plugin. WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, and that mail is widely treated as spam or dropped outright — which is why a mail service is in the requirements.
The application itself is safe either way
Notification email is a convenience layer on top of delivery. An application reaches Bullhorn whether or not anybody was emailed about it, so a mail problem is never a lost application. Check Bullhorn, or the outbox status, before treating this as urgent.
Diagnose
Check in this order
- Does any WordPress email arrive from this site? Trigger a password reset. If that does not arrive either, the problem is site-wide and not this plugin.
- Check the spam folder, including the quarantine on a corporate mail system. Mail sent by PHP from a shared host frequently lands there.
- Check the recipient addresses on W3Bullhorn → Application form. An address that was right when the site was built may belong to somebody who has left.
- Check whether the application actually arrived, with
wp w3rp application-outbox status. If it did not, this is a delivery problem rather than a mail one.
Fix
The fix is almost always SMTP
Configure the site to send through a real mail service rather than through PHP. Any of the established providers will do, and your host may already offer one. This is a site-level change, it benefits every email WordPress sends, and it is the single highest-value thing you can do for deliverability.
Once mail goes through a service, check that service’s own logs when something does not arrive. They tell you whether the message was accepted, bounced or rejected, which is information WordPress itself cannot give you.
If you are sending candidate confirmations, authenticate your domain with that provider as well. A confirmation that lands in a candidate’s spam folder reads as an agency that did not reply.