Contact form no longer send to email

RW vs. 6 19, working with iMac version 10.13.6. The contact form that was working for years suddenly is not forwarding to the listed email address. What could have gone wrong? The settings in the inspector where never changed, everything looks o.k. to me.

contact form settings are incorrect - from name; from email; subject. The ā€˜from email’ certainly needs to be an email address.

Whoever is filling out my contact form needs to enter their email address. How could I know who that is ā€œfrom emailā€? Prospects fill out the form that then is directed to me (positive4thst@gmail.com) See form:

I’ve been creating sites using this form. I’ve found for some reason with a gmail address, the form won’t work reliably. For other addresses, it seems to do fine. And just to make matters even more strange, it works with SOME gmail addresses as long as I don’t add any new fields to the form.

I’m using the latest version of RW and Stacks…

A lot of hosting providers will block email sent like this from going to an external email address (Gmail, etc.). Usually you need to setup an email address on the website’s domain, and then forward those emails out to an external address.

They do this in order to prevent spam from being sent by forms, which can get their IP addresses blacklisted. Often, these changes are made when they update their servers and a once working form will suddenly stop sending to an external address.

Can you send to an email address on the site domain?

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TagandLink and DLH, wow, thank you so much for your insight. This is disappointing news of course and I will have to find a way around it. As to your recommendation of using an email address on the site domain, I don’t exactly know how this works or how to do it. And without that knowledge I probably have to eliminate the contact form altogether. Thanks for the quick responses though.

In case it wasn’t clear, by an email address on the site domain, I meant an email address that ends in that same domain name.

For example, if your site is: www.exampledomain.com, they you would need to use an email address something@exampledomain.com. Most email systems allow you to forward any email coming to an address to be forwarded on to another address, like Gmail in this case.

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A potential other way around this is to drop the contact form (if it’s only a basic contact me form there shouldn’t be a problem) and set up a button that has mailto:youremail@domainname.com

This will trigger the visitor’s email client to send an email directly from themselves and avoid the whole problems with using non domain name email addresses. That way it should get to the gmail address without issue and there won’t be any lost emails due to visitors typing their email address incorrectly.

Also good to use an anonaymiser for the email address to help protect it from spambots.

I think Doobox has a stack for it

The stack @pmjd is referring to is this.

I think the disadvantage of the method Paul recommends is that I’m not sure if it works if the visitor uses a web-based email program, like Gmail, where there’s no client to launch. There may be a way around this that I’m not aware of, of course.

Rob

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I am having the same problem, and my not sending has all to do with the fact that nowadays SPF-records, DMARC-rcords, reverse DNS, etc. must match, especially when e-mail is hosted separately from your website’s server.
So the simple ā€˜send email form any server’-days are long gone, and the only way to send e-mail from a contact form reliably is to have the PHP-script login on an SMTP-server and send the contact form details.

So … my question to you all is … which FORM-stack has SMTP-authentication built in?
Otherwise I have to completely manually code the form.

Thanks,
Marc

Formsnap (stack) and Formloom (plugin) have SMTP functionality :wink:

https://www.yabdab.com/rapidweaver/stacks/formsnap
https://www.yabdab.com/rapidweaver/formloom

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ā€˜mailto’ is a URL protocol. You cannot reliably manipulate the behaviour - it is instead at the discretion of the web browser software to determine what happens when one of those links is clicked.

If the user to the website does not have any email software installed on their computer or device, then in the case of a stack like TouchBase, they can still right-click the button and copy the email address for later. There would be no harm in including a simple instruction telling the end user this.

Having said that, I have witnessed in the past where a ā€˜mailto’ link would automatically open a new browser tab and launch Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever. Whether that is down to some newly built-in browser trickery or a third party extension is unclear. But at a guess, I would say a large proportion of people clicking a ā€˜mailto’ link in a webpage would see something happen!

Another option is to create a contact form that can send messages to a third-party mail handler like Formspree.io or Formbucket.com who then redirect the message onto any email address of your choosing. The Formulate stack is a good choice for this task. I can honestly say that Formulate has been a huge lifesaver to quite a number of RW users struggling to get contact forms working and seeking something simple.

:+1: Purchased it! Going to give it a try.

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