A customer didn't get their email

Work out whether it was sent, and why it did not land.

A customer rings to say nothing arrived. Work down this page in order: most of the time the message was never sent, and only the last two sections are about delivery.

Start here: was it a reminder?

Ask which message they expected. If the answer is a nudge the day before — "your appointment is tomorrow" — nothing is broken and there is no setting to find. Booked does not send appointment reminders. There is no reminder event on the Notifications screen, no "send so many hours before" option, and no job that chases customers. Every message is reactive: it leaves the moment somebody books, pays, or you edit an appointment. Texts cover the same seven moments, so nothing goes out the day before by either route.

Was that message ever going to send?

Booked can message a customer at seven moments: Booking pending, Booking approved, Booking cancelled, Booking rescheduled, Booking changed, Booking refunded and Payment received. Anything that does not map onto one of those sends nothing, silently:

• Marking a booking Completed or No-show sends nothing.
• Deleting a booking sends nothing. To have the customer told, set the status to Cancelled first — that does email — then delete it.
• Refunding never fires Booking refunded, and taking a payment sends Booking approved instead of Payment received — though both templates look live.
• Only one email goes per save. Change the status and the time together and the status email wins; the reschedule email is never sent.

If the event is right, check the message is switched on. Open Booked, expand Customisation, choose Notifications, leave the channel on Email and click the event. The toggle at the top reads Send this email to the customer. All seven emails arrive switched on, so an off one means somebody turned it off — often during setup, to stop test mail reaching customers.

• 1The event list — check you are on the right message. A booking made online with auto-approve off sends Booking pending, not Booking approved.
• 2Send this email to the customer — grey means off, and an off template is skipped at send time. Nothing else on screen warns you.
• 3Save template — the toggle is not stored until you press it, and switching event or channel first discards the change without warning.
• 4Send test — the only way to make a template send on demand. It mails what is in the editor, saved or not, to the address in the box.

Check the address, and who was meant to get it

Open Bookings, find the appointment and open it. Read the address back character by character — a typed .con for .com, or a work address nobody reads, explains a lot of these calls. Correcting it fixes future messages; the missed one cannot be resent, so forward it yourself. Then check they were entitled to a message at all:

• A group booking sends one email, to the person who made it. The rest of the party get nothing.
• Courses and bundles send one email, for the first appointment only. Later visits and same-visit extras get no confirmation of their own.
• A text needs a phone number on the booking — and texting is not live in any case: Settings Emails & texts shows SMS by Booked as Not connected.

Prove your site can send email at all

Every Booked email leaves through WordPress, and on plenty of hosts WordPress cannot send mail. Make it try while you watch: type your own address into the box under Save template and press Send test.

1. "Test email sent."The site handed the message off. Check your inbox, then your spam folder — if it is in neither, read the next section.
2. "Could not send — check the site can send mail."WordPress refused it. Editing the template will not help. Go to Settings Emails & texts.
3. "Enter a valid email address to test."The address in the box is not valid, so nothing was attempted.

A test uses fixed sample details — Alex Sample, a Yellow Fever Vaccination with Priya Sharma at 10:30 — with your real company name and footer. It proves the plumbing works, not that one customer's message went out.

It leaves Booked but lands in spam

If the test sends and nothing arrives, this is deliverability rather than Booked. Nearly always your site is sending as an address it is not authorised to send for — mail claiming to come from hello@bramhallpharmacy.co.uk but handed over by an unrelated web server is what filters are built to catch. Send through a mailbox you own instead, under Settings Emails & texts.

• 1Send emails via — WordPress default hands mail to your web host, where most spam trouble starts. SMTP (Gmail, Outlook, custom) reveals the fields below.
• 2From name and From email — who the message appears to come from. There is no separate reply-to, so replies land wherever From email points. Make it a mailbox somebody reads.
• 3SMTP host and Port — filled by Provider preset: Gmail gives smtp.gmail.com on 587 with TLS, Outlook / Office 365 gives smtp.office365.com. The preset then resets to Choose… — it is a shortcut, not a stored setting.
• 4Username and Password — the mailbox login; for Gmail or Outlook an app password. Leave Username blank and authentication is switched off entirely.

Press Save settings, then use Send test again. Three things here go wrong quietly:

• A blank SMTP host is ignored. Choose SMTP but leave the host empty and mail falls back to the old path — the screen says SMTP while nothing has changed.
• Blank company details look like spam. With Settings Company empty, emails go out under your WordPress site name and admin address — often "My WordPress Site".
• Emails are HTML only, with no plain-text version, which a few strict filters dislike. You cannot change that in the plugin.

What the Activity log can tell you

Settings Activity log records every change made in Booked: booking edits, setting changes, blocked booking attempts, support sign-ins. Open it for one reason: to see what was done to the booking and when, which tells you which email should have fired.

It will not tell you whether an email went out. Customer emails and texts are not written to the log, so a booking's history never shows "confirmation emailed". The only send recorded here is the daily digest.

• 1The digest is the one send that is logged — including a Preview, which always goes to the WordPress account email of whoever pressed it, not the Send to address.
• 2A booking edit tells you which email fired — this was a time change, so the customer should have had Booking rescheduled. Dragging an appointment on the Calendar counts as an edit and emails them too.

Common complaints, and what is behind them