'Contact Us' form does not work

[jellis2000]

Hi all,

I have a problem with the 'Contact Us' email form that I'm hoping somebody has come across before.

It appears that when a customer fills in the senders email address, the ISPs (in this case Freeola's) smtp server rejects the mail as it does not originate from their own domain (a common enough anti-spam measure I understand).

So what happens is the customer gets a receipt for their email, but the email never reaches me.

Anything that originates from the hosts domain is fine - so order confirmations and notifications all work fine as my own email address is 'owned' by Freeola.

Does anybody know a way around this ?

Thanks in advance

Jonathan.

[magicalwonders]

Hello Jonathan,

Instead of using an online form, could you not just use code that brings up the users own email package?

There is some code in the KB that hides your email address from spammers.

Best wishes,

Myles

[Mike Hughes]

This kind of problem is going to get worse anyway as many ISP's will soon enable (AOL is already using it) a spam blocking function that checks emails against a list of pre-defined servers. If the email didn't originate from one of those servers then it is rejected as spam.

You can read more about the 'Sender Policy Framework' here.

http://spf.pobox.com/index.html

So if you send an email saying it's from 'joebloggs@customersdomain.com' but your server isn't listed at the customers domain as a valid server then the email will be binned as spam (and your server could eventually be blacklisted as a source of spam).

Any emails from your site should correctly identify your site as the source of the email. To do it otherwise is asking for trouble.

Mike

[jellis2000]

Solution

I have a good workaround for this problem now.

I have modified the perl scrip, MailForm.pl to do the following:

Receipt To Customer
================

No Changes - mail looks as intended

Mail to Merchant
=============

Change Subject Line to show Customers Email Address
Default Senders Email Address to Merchants Email Address


This all has the desired effect of allowing the mail to be sent, providing the merchants email address domain is owned or approved by the hosting ISP, which I assume is the case in most cases.

Problems
=======

Simply that the subject line is removed - not really an issue as the message body is the all important text, and this way we can at least see who the mail is really from.

I've attached the MailForm.pl if anybody would like to try it out.

Cheers

Jonathan.

[jellis2000]

Here it is....obviously remove the .txt extension.

J.

[Eileen]

I solved this another way... and use the freeola php formmail script

what I did was put a </form> at the start of the Act_ContactUs.html and follow it with my own <form method="post"........
and then the other tweaks I need.

regards,

[NormanRouxel]

You could get the Subject: line to show the customers e-mail then their entered Subject by concatenating these 2.

[jellis2000]

Yes - actually it doesn't matter as the senders email is shown in the email message body anyway, so I have reverted back to the original subject line and now just default the senders address to the merchants address.

An easy solution in the end.

Jonathan