Use this guide when a guest reports that they did not receive an email or found it in their spam/junk folder, when quotes or booking confirmations arrive late, or when your email shows the wrong sender address. This guide covers the emails Lodgix sends to your guests. Find the symptom that matches what you are seeing and follow that section. Most delivery problems come down to one of four things: a sender or verification setting, an SPF DNS record, a custom SMTP requirement, or a guest address that bounced.
Before troubleshooting a specific symptom, run these four cross-cutting checks in order. They resolve the majority of cases:
Is your Contact Email on a free domain (for example gmail.com or yahoo.com)? If so, you cannot send from your own address at all, and the sender options are disabled automatically. You must use a business domain that you control.
Is your Contact Email verified and is Send emails on your behalf turned on? Both are required before any guest mail can use your address.
Did your domain pass the in-app SPF check on the Bookings settings page? (SPF is a setting on your domain's DNS that authorizes Lodgix to send email for you.)
Are there entries in your Guest Email Bounces widget that explain the missing mail?
You will find all of the sender settings under Settings > Important Settings, on the Bookings tab. The custom SMTP option is on the same tab, under the Advanced / Integrations heading. Guest bounces are shown by the Guest Email Bounces widget on your Dashboard.
Symptom 1: Quotes or confirmations arrive hours or days late, or not at all
When mail is slow or missing across the board (not just to one guest), the cause is usually that the account hit a sending safeguard and the message was held back rather than sent.
What is happening
Lodgix protects sending reputation with rate and abuse safeguards. Mail can be held in a deferred queue when an account sends more than its hourly limit, when messages look like exact or near-duplicates, or when content trips a safety filter. Held mail is released gradually in small groups each hour, so a large batch can take hours to fully drain. This is the most common reason a quote or confirmation shows up the next day.
What to check
Did you send a large batch at once, or many near-identical messages? If so, expect the backlog to drain over the following hours.
Is the missing message to a single guest only? If so, check the Guest Email Bounces widget first (see Symptom 4) before assuming a delay.
Is this consistent and ongoing, not a one-time backlog? Ongoing delays usually mean the account needs a support review.
When to contact Lodgix support
You cannot see or clear the deferred queue yourself. If mail is consistently delayed, or appears stuck with no matching bounce, contact Lodgix support and ask us to check the deferred queue and your account sending status. Some held messages (for example anything flagged by the safety filter) are only released manually by our team.
Symptom 2: SPF already includes Lodgix, but mail still shows From the Lodgix.com address
This is almost always a settings and verification gap, not a DNS problem. Adding the SPF record by itself does not change the From address.
What is happening
Until you both verify your Contact Email and turn on Send emails on your behalf, the From address stays as the default Lodgix.com sender. Only when both are in place does mail go out from your own address.
What to check
Confirm your Contact Email is verified. Changing the primary contact email resets the sender options, so a recent contact change can silently revert you to the Lodgix.com sender until you turn them back on.
Confirm Send emails on your behalf is turned on. It is disabled automatically for free email domains.
If you want your company name to appear in the From line, turn on Send emails using company name. (With that option off, your own address is used when its domain matches your reply-to domain.)
Confirm your SPF record contains exactly include:lodgix.com. This is the value the in-app message asks for. Do not substitute any other value you may have seen elsewhere (for example, a provider name from your mail headers). Then re-run the in-app domain validation on the Bookings tab.
Do not judge the result by the "Send Test Email" button — test sends always go out from the default Lodgix address regardless of your settings. Verify with a real quote or confirmation triggered by a reservation.
For the full setup, see Send Emails from Your Email Address and Email Delivery - Best Practices. From the Bookings settings page you can also email yourself a ready-made SPF setup document.
When to contact Lodgix support
If all sender options are on, your Contact Email is verified, the SPF record passes the in-app validation, and the From address is still wrong, contact Lodgix support so we can review the specific record against our validation.
Symptom 3: Custom SMTP is configured, but triggers still send through the default Lodgix sender
A custom SMTP server (for example Office 365) is only used when every requirement is met. If any one fails, mail quietly falls back to the default Lodgix sender. This applies to trigger emails too.
What is happening
For your own SMTP server to be used, all of the following must be true at once:
The Use custom SMTP server option is turned on.
Send emails on your behalf is turned on.
Your Contact Email is verified.
The custom SMTP server has been verified with the emailed verification code.
The sending domain of the message exactly matches the domain saved for your SMTP server.
The most common miss is the last one: the From address domain does not match the verified SMTP domain, so the message falls back to the default sender. A server that was never verified, or Send emails on your behalf being off, will do the same. Note that changing your contact email so the domain no longer matches will also clear the SMTP verification.
What to check
Re-verify the custom SMTP server using the verification flow on the Bookings tab (under Advanced / Integrations).
Confirm your Contact Email domain matches the domain used for your SMTP server.
Confirm Send emails on your behalf is on.
See Send Emails Using a Custom SMTP Server for the full configuration steps.
When to contact Lodgix support
If every setting is correct and mail still goes through the default sender, contact Lodgix support so we can check the saved verification status and domain values and look for connection failures to your server.
Symptom 4: Mail to one guest never arrived (reading the bounced email log)
Lodgix gives you a self-service view of guest email bounces so you can act when a message does not reach a guest.
What to do
Open the Guest Email Bounces widget on your Dashboard (see Bounced Email Log for how to add it).
Review the columns: Date, To, Guest, Invoice ID (the linked reservation), Subject, and Error (the reason the message did not deliver).
Use the Error value to understand the cause. For example, an error such as nomailbox means the address is bad or closed and should be corrected on the guest record, while values such as spam, contentfilter, or blacklisted mean the recipient server rejected or filtered the message.
If many bounces share an SPF or delivery-related error (for example spfproblem), review your SPF setup (see Symptom 2), since missing or incorrect SPF is a common reason mail lands in spam or is rejected.
For more detail, see Bounced Email Log.
When to contact Lodgix support
The widget shows the bounce error, not the full provider delivery detail. If you need the provider-level delivery reason or a delivery timeline for a specific message, contact Lodgix support and we will check the provider event log.
Still not delivering?
If you have worked through the symptom above and the four cross-cutting checks and mail is still not arriving correctly, contact Lodgix support with the affected guest email address, the approximate send time, and which symptom matches. That lets us check the parts of delivery that are managed on our side, such as the deferred queue, your account sending status, and the provider event log.
Note: a guest mailbox may still filter a message to spam even when everything on your side is correct. That is controlled by the recipient mail provider. A correct SPF record (include:lodgix.com) at your DNS host gives your mail the best chance of landing in the inbox. See Email Delivery - Best Practices.