It won’t let me change Administration email – It’s doing my head in

Hi!

I’m new to WordPress (but not new to website development, been doing that since the 90s!). I decided I wanted to set the site up locally using Local (by Flywire) and downloaded WordPress. When I got to the screen I put in a WordPress Username, password and… STUPIDLY left the WordPress Email bit with what was the default, which was something I hadn’t seen before so I assumed it was some kind of email I had to use: dev-email@wpengine.local

In hindsight, I should have deleted that .local email address and put in my real email.

Anyhow, I’ve spent the past two weeks building the site, learning everything, using plugins, it’s been a steep learning curve, using child themes for the first time and relying heavily on Chat GPT to talk me through the basics. And I’m now getting ready to finish the website and eventually export it.

But this is where I keep getting issues. For example, I get errors when creating Contact Forms, configuration errors because I am putting my real email address in because I obviously don’t want emails going to dev-email@wpengine.local because I don’t know where those emails are going.

But every time I try and change the Admin email, it just stays in pending. If I go to Users, the email is of course listed as this bizarre dev-email@wpengine.local and I put in that I want to change it to my real email address hello@aibaba.co.uk, a message says “If you change this, an email will be sent at your new address to confirm it. The new address will not become active until confirmed.“

But no email ever arrives to confirm it! It just says “There is a pending change of your email to hello@aibaba.co.uk” and nothing happens. There’s no email in my inbox to approve, I’ve looked in Spam, I’ve looked everywhere. It never gets sent.

Why is it pending? What can I do? Have I wasted the last two weeks? I’m finding this all so frustrating and upsetting. I am hoping someone here has the answer.

I keep trying, it says it’s pending, and then after updating my User profile it says at the top “Your email address has not been updated yet. Please check your inbox at hello@aibaba.co.uk for a confirmation email.”

But it never comes. And I don’t know why. I’m not stupid, I’ve been working on websites since 1994!

I’m using a PC, running Windows 10.