Hi friends 👋🏻

Your website probably has at least one form on it – like a contact form – and hopefully you get an email notification when someone submits that form.

What happens when those email notifications stop working? 😱

A couple of variations of that problem have cropped up in the last couple of weeks on different websites, so this week, some tips about how to prevent this from happening, and how to troubleshoot!

---

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

---

How do we get from form submitted to email received?

There are 3 steps here:

1. User fills out the contact form and clicks the "Submit" button
2. The form sends a request to an email sending server to send a notification email to you
3. That notification email lands in your inbox

Or at least if everything's working as it should, that's what happens.

But things can go wrong at all three of these stages. And if this process isn't working, this is a BIG PROBLEM.

The most important user actions on your website typically involve forms:

• Contact forms
• Donation forms
• Email subscription forms
• Download request forms
• Volunteer inquiry forms

In some of these cases, the form is doing other things besides sending an email. For example, a donation form is processing a payment. An email subscription form is passing data to your email marketing platform. Those steps are important and should be monitored too!

But here I'm focused on why those emails might stop working.

Step 1: User submits the form

This one is easy enough to check. You can visit your website, fill out the form and hit submit. Hopefully you'll see whatever confirmation message you have configured.

Then to make sure your website platform has actually captured the data that was submitted, go check the place in your website dashboard where form entries are stored.

• If you're using WordPress and a form plugin like Gravity Forms, there's a view for form entries in your dashboard. If your user account doesn't have admin permissions, you might need to ask your developer to make sure you can see this view.
• On Squarespace, the form storage options are more limited. Check this article for more information about where form submissions can be stored.
• On Wix, there's a form submissions dashboard. Get more information about that here.

I recommend checking that submitting the form is easy and functionality on desktop and mobile devices. Forms are an area where the mobile device user experience often fails ... but that's a topic for another day.

Step 2: Form passes an email request to an email sending server

This one really depends on your website platform.

For fully-hosted platforms like Squarespace and Wix, any notification emails that are triggered by form submissions are sent from an email address with the platform's domain, using their servers, not from your custom domain. For example, this contact form notification email from a Squarespace website is sent from "form-submission@squarespace.info", even though the website has a custom domain.

On a self-hosted WordPress site, you (or more likely your developer) will have set up a custom email sending server that is responsible for sending email on behalf of your website, from the domain that you own.

For example, on the Blue Hills Digital website, I use a service called Postmark to send emails originating from the website, and those emails come from my ed@bluehillsdigital.com email address.

On a Squarespace or Wix website, this email sending step of the process is highly unlikely to fail, because the platforms don't let you customize the sending process. This doesn't mean you shouldn't test it though!

On a more advanced WordPress site, this step does introduce a potential point of failure. If the connection between your website and the email sending service breaks, the form could be submitted and the entry saved, but the email would fail to send.

This means that if you rely on the email notifications to alert you to a form submission, users could be submitting the form and you would never know unless you checked the form entries dashboard!

Again, this is easy to test. Just submit the form and make sure the email is generated and sent.

Many email sending integrations also allow you to set up email-sending failure alerts, which can tip you off to something that has stopped working.

In case this sounds like the customized WordPress solution is a bad idea, bear in mind this risk is balanced out by the fact that you can fully customize all the email notifications generated from form submissions, and have them land in users' inboxes from your email address, not from a generic Squarespace email address like the example above. In my view it's worth the extra maintenance checks to have that level of professional delivery and customization.

Step 3: The email arrives in your inbox

One more point of failure to watch for. Even though the email notification is triggered, you should check to make sure those emails are landing in your inbox and not getting blocked or sent to your spam folder.

Since you're not in control of the sending email address or domain if you use a platform like Squarespace or Wix, the best you can do is add whatever sending address they use (like "form-submission@squarespace.info") to your safe senders list or contact list.

If you are using a custom WordPress site, you should make sure the service that is sending those email notifications is fully authenticated, to help those emails land in your inbox.

If you have a Gmail inbox, there's an easy way to check this. Fill out your form to generate a test email to your Gmail inbox, and when the email arrives, click the three-dot icon in the top-right corner of the message and click "Show Original". See the highlighted link in the screenshot below.

After you select the "Show Original" item, you'll see the full email request, including the headers. This looks like a whole lot of technical code (which it is), but you're just looking to make sure the email passed three authentication tests. Specifically, you should see the word PASS (not FAIL) on the three links in the header labeled SPF, DKIM and DMARC. See the screenshot below to know where to look:

If you don't see PASS in all of these fields, it's time to check in with your website developer, or the support team for the website and email products you're using.

Failing these authentication checks can result in your notification emails landing in spam folders.

This may be avoidable for you, as the website owner, since you are looking for these emails and can mark them as "not spam". But if you're also relying on this system to send emails to website users, you want to make sure these emails get delivered!

---

I hope this is helpful, and helps at least one of you dear subscribers avoid a situation where people are submitting your important forms and you don't get notified!

---

Do you have a website project coming up this year that you want to discuss?

I offer free consultations for nonprofit org staff considering a website rebuild or redesign, or who need help answering questions like these.

I'm currently booking new projects to start in April and beyond.

If you want to chat, use this link to find a time for us to talk.

---