Web forms - email debugging

When a customer completes a web form, an email is sent to you via this process:

• If the form contained a "from" field, then the email will be crafted with that address as the email from address. If not, it will be sent from same as the destination email address.
• The destination email address is the default email address for your website, as per your contact details page or the address loaded in the More tab, under contact details. You can override this destination email address in the page options area under notification email address. If the form is an enquiry form on a info page or gallery page, then the destination address is the one specified there.
• If the from or destination email address is obviously invalid, then the thank you page may return a system error like: javax.mail.internet.AddressException. Some invalid email addresses may still get through and fail after being sent.
• Our applications then pass the email on to our email servers to send. Our email servers will check for a local email configuration, eg using the forwarding rules or drop it in your mail box.
• If you have forwarding rules enabled, then the email will have been forwarded, and from that point on, we can't track it, so talk to the provider of your forwarding email address and ensure that our servers are whitelisted as below.
• If you have configured email settings via our CMS, but actually have your email servers offsite, then our configuration will take priority. You should disable our email settings if you don't want us to process your email externally. If the email should be delivered externally, we will deliver it to the MX records for your domain. Again, if we should not manage your DNS either, then make sure our DNS settings for your domain say "None/External"

If your email is managed elsewhere, either by MX records or email forwarding addresess, then it is possibly your emails might be spam filtered before they get to you. If customers have configured their domains to only validate emails originating from specific IP's, then you need to ensure that our servers are contained in your whitelist or that you add our IP range to your SPF records. Because the IP addresses we use, might not agree with the IP addresses relevant to the from addresses in the web forms.

If you continue to have issues, consider these thoughts

• Our forms work for 99% of our customers. Those who it doesn't work for, have normally configured their email incorrectly or have tight restrictions on their incoming mail servers.
• If you have tightened email server security and tightened spam filtering on your servers, then that is your decision, and the consequences that go with it. We can only support the services that we provide.
• If you manage your own email servers, or outsource that, then we cannot debug the issue, sorry, out of our hands. If you can prove to us that your destination email address is valid, and that your test email was not received by your "server" (i mean show us a log snippet from your public facing mail server at the moment in time you sent a test post.), then we will show you our logs, showing you that we delivered the message to your mail server, or we can do it at anytime for a support fee.
• Consider not using the "from" field in your form, and having all emails appear to originate from destination address. This has implications for our automatic CRM functionality which is based on the from address.
• Consider not having a web form and using an email link instead.