I have a bit of an odd issue on our WordPress site that is currently under development on a subdomain of our primary domain.

It is a basic WordPress with Woocommerce and a couple other plugins for payments, nothing too fancy. I configured Woocommerce, ordered some products and it is all working fine. I am receiving a confirmation mail from the admin email I provided. Let’s say no-reply@example.com even though the website is hosted on new.example.com.

Now one of the admins forgot his password, so he requested a new one, but no email was delivered. I did some debugging and didn’t receive one myself either, even though I am still receiving Woocommerce emails.

So I googled and found the Check Email plugin. By default it wanted to use my own personal @gmail for the From header, so I tested that one, but also with a custom From: no-reply@example.com. I didn’t receive the one sent from my Gmail (obviously), but I did receive the no-reply version. So I am sure that wp_mail() is working.

Which made me think if there was an old setting in the wp_options table, or any other table. So I searched them all for no-reply@example.com and mypersonal@gmail.com, on all columns, every single row. I also performed a search on all files within the wordpress/ directory to see if there is anything hardcoded (using grep -rnw 'wordpress/' -e 'tried a couple varieties'). I did this because because wordpress says the following on the settings page:

Dit adres wordt gebruikt voor administratieve doeleinden. Als je het wijzigt, sturen wij een e-mail naar je nieuwe adres om het te bevestigen. Het nieuwe adres zal niet actief worden voordat het is bevestigd.

ROUGHLY TRANSLATED: This email address will be used for admin purposes, if you edit, a verification email will be send. It won’t get active before it is verified.

When I first added this email address, it didn’t even exist yet, now the mailbox does, but I am not getting a new verification email, after changing it to another email on the same domain, to my gmail, nothing.

So I need your help… What else could I try to fix this issue?

Summary of what I tried

• WooCommerce works just fine
• Check Email plugin works just fine, as long as I use any email from @example.com
• Checked the entire database for old email settings which might be overriding anything
• Checked every single file in the wordpress directory for a wrong hardcoded email

System

I have a WordPress install on a Debian 10 Buster VPS with PHP7.4