RW8 contact form email issues and a workaround

Classic General
1

I’m a relatively new RW8 user, migrating from Adobe Muse. I’ve created a small site with a contact form. I’ve tried for the better part of the day to get the RW8 contact form to consistently send an me an email. Since the form sends an email from whatever server it resides in, it uses the web server’s default email as the sender. In many servers, you can’t edit the domain to add a spf or dkim record to authenticate the outgoing email. Even worse, is that if you set “Your Email:” to “Your Email” field, the form sends me the email as if it’s from the email of the person filling in the form… Via the host server’s default email! It essentially spoofs the email of the person filling in the form. As dmarc protected email servers are becoming more and more prevalent (and pretty much forcing the use of spf and dkim records), it’s a problem. All my email accounts are rejecting the email. I only find out that a form was filled in by checking the rejected emails in the cPanel of my web host.

I’ve had some success getting the form to work by selecting “Send email using your own address” AND setting “From Email:” to anything but the “Your Email” field of the form. Then, the email is only spoofing your name or the subject. Seems to work. For such a highly rated app, this is really a klunky way to get this done and a total waste of many hours of trial and error. I don’t want to use PHP mailers as I’m nervous about security.

So I guess the question is: Apart from using an embedded HTML from created with some other form service (speed of loading issues), is there a reasonably priced form stack available where you can set smtp parameters (stand-alone hopefully and not part of a collection)?

Thanks in advance!
JE

2

You might want to have a look at:
https://www.doobox.co.uk/stacks_store/demos/htmlcontact.html

Even though you can not alter SMTP settings, it works well for my clients on different European hoster.

3

Thanks! I’ll check it out…

4

I don’t want to hi-jack this thread with self promotions, but the Formulate stack has been of help to some RapidWeaver users, who have hit problems with sending contact form messages through some hosting providers.

It can re-route messages through a third-party service like FormBucket or FormSpree.io. Therefore it by-passes the mail handling on your web server and will work with practically any email address.

Just thought I would add this here, because this stack has been of genuine help to some people, who otherwise faced the worrying prospects of either abandoning the use of contact forms or switching hosting providers mid-way through expensive contracts.

Formulate supports many more input types than the RW contact form plugin. There is a free demo version to download and try, without any obligation.

2 Likes
5

Good input… although rerouting opens a lot of GDPR questions…

6

Not a problem:

:wink:

7

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.