[Pro] Send Form action issue

It seems there are some email servers that reject emails sent from this action. me.com or iCloud.com specifically. If I enter an address in ‘recipient’ for either of those it will never arrive, appear in junk or elsewhere, however if I change the recipient in the same form to a gmail address it arrives instantly. Any ideas on this issue would be appreciated.


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This is a common issue when sending mail. Because of the rampant SPAM problem in the world, most servers scrutinize the incoming message and apply various tests to each one it to determine its probability of being fraudulent.

When the PHP code generated by this Action sends a message, it does so using the underlying sendmail service on the Web server. That Web server has a name, probably something useless like bunny.yourhostingprovider.net or similar. (To be clear, each server on the net has one true name, bound to its numerical IP address.) When that server sends mail, the receiving server can look up that name instantaneously during the process of accepting the message for the account owner.

Now when your server sends a message through the PHP code generated by this Action, it gets sent by the person who filled out the form, so the raw message appears to come from joe(a)example.com, but it is actually sent by www(a)yourhostingprovider.com from a server that has nothing at all to do with joe(a)example.com.

Many hosts will drop the message right there, sensing that it probably came from an infected Windows box being zombified from somewhere in the Balkans.

There are settings in the Action that may be able to work around this, but you will lose the ability to reply directly to the message and have it go to the person who filled out the form. If that’s an issue for you, then as you noted, use a gmail address to accept the incoming messages.

To work around this and send to a .mac account, then change the Sender Address from a choice of the e-mail field in your form to a hand-entered actual mail account on the Web server. Most hosting providers will give you a number of e-mail addresses in your domain on their server, so pick one that you have set up on that hosting package and use it as the sender.

Make sure that your host has set up MX records for your domain on their server. All of this is controlled in the cPanel, and you can file a support ticket with your provider if any of it is unclear, and they should be able to sort this out for you easily.

Once you have set that address as the sender, the e-mail field you provide in your form will no longer control the sender’s address, but will instead be contained within the body of the message as one of the variables. So you can click on it in the message you receive from the form, and use that as the impetus for a new message replying to that person, but you can’t just reply to the message, as that will go to the in-box on the Web server. This should just work, because the message is coming from a registered address in the registered mail server for your domain, and so many of the SPAM trap checkboxes will be ticked off in the “not spam” column that the message almost certainly will come through.

Walter

On Apr 24, 2014, at 10:04 AM, Seth Rosenblum wrote:

It seems there are some email servers that reject emails sent from this action. me.com or iCloud.com specifically. If I enter an address in ‘recipient’ for either of those it will never arrive, appear in junk or elsewhere, however if I change the recipient in the same form to a gmail address it arrives instantly. Any ideas on this issue would be appreciated.


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Thanks Walter for your clear, informative explanation!!


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Sorry to resurrect this!

But, can someone explain this part of Walt’s reply (I have a client complaining of missing emails sent via the Send Form action):

To work around this and send to a .mac account, then change the Sender Address from a choice of the e-mail field in your form to a hand-entered actual mail account on the Web server. Most hosting providers will give you a number of e-mail addresses in your domain on their server, so pick one that you have set up on that hosting package and use it as the sender.

Thanks!


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Sure. I can expand on this a bit. When you get a hosting account somewhere, very often they will give you e-mail on the same server. This can seem like a bundle package, depending on the host, where you sign up for your domain there as well, and so the fact that you have entered mycompany.com in the initial setup form means you now have a web site at www.mycompany.com and mail at email@hidden and ye olde ftp.mycompany.com for whatever reason.

So in your control panel at said hosting provider, you will probably find a Mail section in the navigation, and you will find that there are a couple of addresses already set up, or if not, that you can create some. Once you have such an address in hand, you can update the Send Mail Action interface to use that address as the From: header address. The default is that if there is an e-mail input in the form, that gets to be the From: address. This is very handy, because then you can simply reply to the e-mail in order to reach the person who contacted you. But if your hosting provider has restricted who can send mail through their server, this will be a no-go.

Walter

On Feb 4, 2019, at 2:11 PM, gavtro email@hidden wrote:

Sorry to resurrect this!

But, can someone explain this part of Walt’s reply (I have a client complaining of missing emails sent via the Send Form action):

To work around this and send to a .mac account, then change the Sender Address from a choice of the e-mail field in your form to a hand-entered actual mail account on the Web server. Most hosting providers will give you a number of e-mail addresses in your domain on their server, so pick one that you have set up on that hosting package and use it as the sender.

Thanks!


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Thanks. I’m still not clear, though. As it stands, my client is only receiving occasional emails via his website’s contact form, which is powered by the Send Form action. A number of them are vanishing into thin air on a regular basis. At the moment, the action is set up with three recipient email addresses (two of my client’s gmail addresses and my own email). Reading through different threads on here, it seems that there is a method to help ensure that missing emails don’t vanish, but I’m not sure what I have to put, and where to put it, in the action.


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If you have followed the directions of the Send Form Action, then you have doubtless chosen a field in your form to use as the Sender Address (referred to in my previous message as the From: header; a technical term that means precisely what it sounds like). When a mail message is composed and sent through a mail server, that mail server can be configured to ignore messages that are not from its own domain. This is a choice that the hosting provider can make. This choice would be made if your hosting provider has a big problem with people using its services to send out spam e-mail.

So if you followed the directions, you would be sending mail through your hosting provider’s mail server that had a From: header of your_customer(a)their_domain.com. Your hosting provider’s server would drop it on the floor, as it was configured to do. The only forms that would successfully be sent would be those sent from another domain also hosted on your hosting provider’s servers.

There is another option in the Send Form interface – you can enter a valid e-mail address in the Sender Address field, and that address will be used as the From: header. The trick here would be to use an address on YOUR domain, so it would be whitelisted by the server and the mail would go through.

Does that make this any clearer?

Walter

On Feb 5, 2019, at 6:19 PM, gavtro email@hidden wrote:

Thanks. I’m still not clear, though. As it stands, my client is only receiving occasional emails via his website’s contact form, which is powered by the Send Form action. A number of them are vanishing into thin air on a regular basis. At the moment, the action is set up with three recipient email addresses (two of my client’s gmail addresses and my own email). Reading through different threads on here, it seems that there is a method to help ensure that missing emails don’t vanish, but I’m not sure what I have to put, and where to put it, in the action.


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Yes, that’s brilliant, Walter - thank you very much!


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