Alerts and email

Traffic decay alerts

A Pro feature. When a post's clicks fall by more than your chosen percentage against the previous period, PostPulse raises an alert in the dashboard and, if you want, sends an email.

Each alert names what actually happened rather than just reporting a drop: whether you lost ranking, lost impressions, or held your position and stopped being clicked. The queries behind it are listed with their before and after numbers.

Settings, Alerts controls the threshold, whether email is sent, and where it goes.

Seasonal drops

Alerts are checked against two seasonality signals before they are raised: whether the rest of your site fell at the same time, and whether the same post fell in the same weeks a year ago. Anything that matches is labelled possibly seasonal, with the reason.

By default these are labelled, not hidden, because a seasonal decline is still real. There is a setting to skip them entirely if you would rather not be told.

The monthly recap

Once a month PostPulse emails a summary of what it has actually done: actions completed, clicks recovered, auto-link clicks, broken links fixed. It goes to the same address as alerts and is available on every plan.

Nothing is sent until there is something real to report, so a new install does not receive an empty first recap. You can turn it off in Settings, Alerts.

If the email is not arriving

This is almost always a WordPress problem rather than a PostPulse one, and it affects every plugin on your site that sends mail.

By default WordPress sends from wordpress@yourdomain.com, an address that usually does not exist and is not authorised to send for your domain. Modern mail providers check that authorisation through SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and mail that fails is put in spam or rejected outright. Nothing in the message is wrong: the sender simply cannot be verified.

Why PostPulse does not just change the sending address

Because on a site that is already set up correctly, overriding the From address would replace a verified sender with an unverified one and break delivery that was working. The sending address is a site wide decision, so PostPulse leaves it to the tool whose job that is.

Things to check first

• The recipient address in Settings, Alerts. If it is blank, PostPulse uses your WordPress admin address.
• Your spam folder, which is where unauthenticated mail usually lands.
• That the alert email toggle is actually on.
• That a sync has run recently, since alerts are raised during a sync.

Alerts always appear in the dashboard whether or not email is working, so you are never relying on mail alone.

When things run

Syncing, alert checks and cleanup run once a day on WordPress cron, which fires when someone visits your site. On a very quiet site that can drift. Sync Now in Settings runs everything immediately.