Email delivery

Why candidate emails land in spam or never arrive, what Vakanssi does and does not control, and how to set up authenticated sending so confirmations, invites, and booking links reach the inbox.

Vakanssi sends real, time-sensitive mail: an application confirmation, interview invitations with a calendar file attached, rejection and offer letters, and on Pro, the private booking link a candidate uses to pick an interview slot. If those land in spam, nobody tells you. The candidate assumes you never replied.

This page is about making sure they arrive.

What Vakanssi does, and what it does not

Vakanssi hands every message to wp_mail(), the standard WordPress mail function, the same one that sends your password resets. It sets the sender identity you configured under Hiring, then Settings, then Emails, and writes each attempt to a log.

Since v0.33.40, every Vakanssi email, interview invitations included, takes that one path, and each carries a plain-text version alongside the HTML. Spam filters score HTML-only mail against you, so that alone helps.

Vakanssi does not deliver the mail itself. It has no mail server, no SMTP settings, and no sending account of its own. Whatever your WordPress site uses to send mail, Vakanssi uses too, which is also why fixing delivery for your site fixes it for Vakanssi with nothing to change here.

Why default hosting mail fails

Mail servers decide what to trust using three records published in your domain’s DNS: SPF (which servers may send as your domain), DKIM (a signature proving the message was not altered), and DMARC (what to do when the first two do not line up).

A plain PHP mail() send from shared hosting carries none of that. Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require SPF and DKIM from every sender, so unauthenticated mail is now junked or refused outright rather than merely looking suspicious.

That is the whole problem. It is not about Vakanssi, WordPress, or your theme. It is about whether the receiving server can prove your mail is really yours.

The From address has to be at your own domain

This is the single most common cause, and no mailer plugin can work around it.

Your From email under Hiring, then Settings, then Emails must be an address at the domain your site runs on, for example careers@yourcompany.com. If you leave it as a free mailbox address at gmail.com, outlook.com, or yahoo.com, those providers publish a DMARC policy telling the world to reject mail that claims to be from them but was sent by somebody else’s server. Your host is somebody else’s server.

Vakanssi falls back to your WordPress administrator address when the From field is empty, and on a small site that is often exactly the free mailbox address to avoid. Set it explicitly.

Setting up authenticated sending

Nothing in Vakanssi needs to change beyond the From address. It picks up the new transport automatically because it never had its own.

Checking that it worked

Vakanssi ships three ways to see the truth, none of which requires a real candidate.

Read that Site Health check for what it is. Since v0.36.4 it says your emails “are being sent”, not delivered: it can see that your site handed each message to its mail transport, not whether it reached an inbox. A site that has sent nothing yet is told there is nothing to judge, and pointed at the email test.

Since v0.33.40, a send cut short by a server error, usually a PHP timeout or memory limit, is counted separately from a failed send, so it no longer points you at a mailer plugin you do not need.

What “sent” means in the log

Every message Vakanssi sends is recorded, and you can read an application’s own history in the Activity tab of its candidate panel.

Be careful how you read it. “Sent to” means WordPress accepted the message for delivery, not that it reached anybody. A send that ends up in a spam folder, or that a receiving server drops later, still shows as sent. “Could not be sent” is narrower: your site refused to send at all, which usually means no mail transport is configured.

An entry reading “is being sent” means the send has started and has not reported back yet.

A message Vakanssi can rebuild has a Resend link beside it in the Activity tab: the four standard templates, plus booking links (Scheduling Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license) and automated stage emails (Email Automation Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license). Resend deliberately overrides the de-duplication that normally stops a candidate getting two copies of the same email.

A resent candidate email goes to the candidate’s current address, and the confirmation names it. Interview invitations are resent with Resend invite on the interview itself, and with Email & Notifications switched off no Resend link is offered at all.

Where this shows up elsewhere

• The setup wizard offers a test send on its Emails step, so delivery problems surface before your first real applicant.
• The Support report card on the Status tab records how many sends failed in the last 7 days and which mailer plugin it detected, which is exactly what to attach when you ask for help.
• Firewalls & server compatibility covers hosts that block outbound SMTP ports.