Recently, BsnTech Networks has started to see an increase in the number of mail delivery failure notifications from contact forms on customer websites.
Why? The larger e-mail providers – such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail (Outlook) have started to use some of the spam frameworks that are many years old. One such policy is DMARC – which is what Google Gmail has started using in the past few months.
In essence, DMARC is a policy framework that ensures that a mail server is “authoritative” for sending e-mail from a specific domain name. Because many contact forms are setup to have the “From” address as the e-mail address that someone filled in on the customer’s contact form, it makes it look like the message is coming from their e-mail address.
As an example – if someone goes to a customer’s contact form on their website and fills in an e-mail address of “johnny@yahoo.com”, it will send out the e-mail to the website owner and show it came from “johnny@yahoo.com”. Well, if the website owner wants the form to be sent to an e-mail address on Gmail, Yahoo, or another provider, they may reject the message because the mail server / web server that sent the e-mail is not allowed to send a message from Yahoo users.
To fix the mail delivery failures on customer contact forms, you must hard-code the “From” address to one that matches the customer’s domain name. As an example, our domain name is bsntech.com. In the contact form settings, we would set the “From” address to something like “noreply@bsntech.com”. The main key here is to ensure the From address has their domain name in it. So it could be <anything>@bsntech.com – just as long as it has their domain name in there.
Because web hosting and mail servers are authoritative for the domain name of the website, the message should then be allowed through to providers like Gmail or Yahoo.
BsnTech Networks would be happy to help anyone that has a website contact form that is having difficulty receiving e-mails from their contact forms. We have experience with fixing the mail failures from contact forms on websites.