I put a contact form on my blog, and then discovered that the messages sent through it never reached me.
For someone like me, who is not good with computers, that is the kind of problem where you simply put your hands up. But by talking it through with my AI partner Kuro (Claude), I got to the bottom of it.
So this time I want to show you the back-and-forth with Kuro as directly as I can. Rather than the technical terms, I hope what comes across is the feeling of “if you ask AI like this, it will help you like that”.
The form said “sent”. My inbox said nothing.
When I sent a test message through the contact form, the screen showed green text: “Your message has been sent.” So it was going out.
And yet nothing ever arrived in my Gmail. Not in the inbox. Not in the spam folder. Nowhere.
Sent, but not delivered. I could not make sense of it, so I went crying to Kuro.
Asking Kuro for help
I told him the form submits fine but no mail arrives, and the first thing he questioned was the sending mechanism itself.
WordPress, left at its default settings, can be unreliable at sending mail. Let’s use a plugin called “WP Mail SMTP” so it properly goes through the mail function of the Xserver account you are paying for.
Xserver is a Japanese hosting company, and it is where this blog lives. I did as I was told: I created an email address for the blog on the server (the info@ one), and then, with Kuro guiding me, typed the server details into the plugin.
SMTP host, port, encryption method. Honestly, I did not understand half of what I was doing. But because Kuro said “next, put this value in this field”, one at a time, I never got lost.
That fixed it, I thought. It did not. Still nothing arrived. When I said “hmm, still no good”, Kuro replied that there seemed to be another cause, and started thinking about the next move.
The decisive clue: one English email I could not read
Around that time, an unfamiliar English email showed up in my Gmail. The subject line was “Undelivered Mail”.
It looked difficult, so I took a screenshot and showed it to Kuro. “Is this related?”
His reaction changed.
Very much so. This is an extremely important clue. Now the cause is clear.
According to Kuro, the error mail said this: Gmail requires the sender to be authenticated with SPF or DKIM. DKIM = did not pass. SPF = did not pass.
One email, written in English, that was complete gibberish to me. I just showed it to him, and he named the cause.
That is, I think, the easiest thing about asking an AI for help: when you are stuck, you can just show it your screen.
Getting SPF and DKIM explained in plain words
Still, SPF and DKIM were words I had never heard in my life. So I asked, “what are those?”
Both of them are like an ID card for your email. Gmail tried to confirm “is this sender really genuine?”, but that ID (SPF and DKIM) had not been prepared on your domain yet. So it was rejected as a possible impersonation.
That landed. Nothing was wrong with my settings. It was that this was a brand-new domain sending mail for the first time, so it had not earned any trust yet.
Swapping technical jargon for a familiar comparison like that is the part of talking with Kuro that helps me the most.
Doing exactly what I was told
The fix came as a set of steps too. Kuro said Xserver has a dedicated menu for SPF and DKIM.
In the server panel, under the “Mail” menu, there are “DKIM settings” and “SPF settings”. Open DKIM first, select your domain, and turn it on. Then check SPF the same way.
I opened it, and there they really were. No difficult code to type in. Just a toggle switch to flip on. It was almost anticlimactic. While I was in there, I also switched on an item called “allow Gmail”.
It still did not arrive. But this time I did not panic.
I sent a test message straight after saving. Still nothing.
The old me would have panicked at that point and started poking at settings all over the place.
But this time Kuro had already told me this in advance:
Even after you set SPF and DKIM, it takes time for the change to spread around the world. It is called waiting for DNS to propagate, and it can take a few hours, or as long as the next day. So if mail does not arrive right after you save, that usually is not a mistake, just propagation that has not finished. Don’t rush to change the settings again. Wait a little.
To be safe, I took another screenshot of the settings screen and had Kuro check it. SPF and DKIM were both on, and the contents of the DKIM record (a long string that looks like a code) had been generated properly. He gave me his stamp of approval: the settings are correct, the rest is a matter of time. So I waited, without worrying.
What this job left me with
Honestly, whether or not an email gets delivered is something I would never have solved on my own. I did not even know the words SPF and DKIM existed.
But I could tell Kuro “I’m stuck”, show him the error screen as-is, and he would pin down the cause. Difficult words get broken down into comparisons. And on top of that, he supports the emotional side too, telling me it is fine to wait instead of panicking.
The thing I most want to get across in this series is not actually the mail settings themselves. It is this:
even if you are bad with computers, you can get over difficult things like this when you have an AI to talk to.
That sense of traction is what I felt most strongly during this particular job.
What I used for this
This blog runs on Xserver. Even settings that sound hard, like SPF and DKIM, were just a switch in a dedicated menu. For a beginner working through things with AI, it was a very reassuring place to be hosted.
Next time, I finally take the first step toward earning money and go after a Google AdSense application together with Kuro. If you want to see how that went, read preparing for an AdSense application. And if you like this kind of “it works on my screen but not somewhere else” mystery, I also wrote about links that only fail on mobile.
