Hello!
I have been noticing for multiple sites, people are not receiving email notifications when someone fills out a form. When I use my email, it works fine.
But when we use their email, they don't get anything. The weird part is, at one point it was working for them. Could this be due to an upgrade to the plugin or maybe just a spam filter issue?
Thank you very much for your help!
E-mail notifications is a really complex issue, so we've come up with the following steps to troubleshoot the issue. Can you please run through them?
http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/Troubleshooting_Notifications
Yes, any default WP theme would be fine to test.
I tried all of these steps & am unable to diagnose the problem. When filling out a form, if I put John.smith@adclub.com (our domain) or John.smith@pilot.com (or any other domain I've tried), the form sends me the notification.
The Problem: The form was setup specifically for FedEx....and when a FedEx.com email address is used, the notification doesn't come to me (or show up anywhere in spam).
Thanks,
Jeremiah
Notifications do not work for me either after 1.7. Nothing else has changed on my side. I ran all the tests on the troubleshooting page, and the problem exists with even the base theme and no plugins. I have to conclude that Gravity Forms notifications are broken at 1.7. It's a shame too, because I liked Gravity Forms. I guess I'll try Wooforms or some other service. Frustrating when a product you paid for just breaks on update. Even more frustrating to read the attitudes of the dev team on this forum for any number of questions.
@upc1977 - you could use our priority support form and we can take a look for you:
@upc1977 Never conclude that Gravity Forms is broken when it comes to notification issues because in 99.999% of the instances over the lifetime of Gravity Forms that has been proven not to be the case. It's typically web server related or a combination of what is configured in the notification and web server issues related to sending email.
The actual function related to sending notifications has not changed. It still uses wp_mail() which is a core WordPress function. Believe me, you're not the first user to jump to that conclusion.
Let our support team assist you as Rob mentions above and we can help you debug the issue and determine what is going on. Let our support team decide when something is broken. Anything else is just jumping to conclusions.
Jeremiah,
We don't discriminate against fedex emails or anything of the like, so it's odd that you get notifications using any other email address aside from one that ends in fedex.com
I can send you a logging add-on that will show you what gets passed over to wp_mail(). Just email me at rob@rocketgenius.com and reference this post.
Again, GF does not send out notifications, your web host does. Have you tried an SMTP plugin?
I haven't tried the SMTP plugin, because honestly, I don't understand what it's going to do (will I have to just simply set it up with my web host's parameters)......or do I have to also go into each form & change the notification settings (I have hundreds of forms created, all with similar notification settings).
Thanks,
Jeremiah
By the way....my web host said what I'm essentially doing, in the form, is "Spoofing" an email to myself (The notification comes over so I can reply directly to my client, from the email they input)....
He thought that FedEx might have some security that prevents such things (but, again, we've had success using this form for a couple years).
Your host is right - Not receiving notifications can happen when you do things such as configure the Send From address of email notifications to an email address that does not use the same domain name as the web site itself.
@jerbalmya I can definitely provide me insight into this. Sending email via PHP is an extremely complex thing and unfortunately the vast majority of it is outside of Gravity Forms control and actually resides at the server and DNS level.
If you receive the notifications at your John.smith@adclub.com email address but not when they are sent to a @fedex.com email address then a variety of things could be happening.
First it could be due to the fact the ip address associated with your web server is on a blacklist used by whoever manages @fedex.com email. If that's the case any email sent from your IP address is going to wind up in spam or possibly discarded entirely. This can happen with shared hosts where IP addresses are shared and one user has ruined it for the other users by causing the IP address to get blacklisted.
Second it could be due to the fact the web server and DNS is not properly setup to reliably send email. What your web host says is partly correct. It could be considered spoofing if the web server and DNS associated with the site aren't configured in such a way that it doesn't appear that the email is legitimate.
The second issue is the most likely cause. This means you would need to take some steps to make sure that email send via your web server is sent in a more reliable fashion so that it looks more authentic to email servers that are configured in an extremely secure fashion.
Some steps you can take include configuring SPF records for the domain of the web site so that at the DNS level it's saying your web server is allowed to send email on behalf of that domain name. Another thing you can do is then configure your WordPress site to send email via SMTP.
I would suggest reading this extremely good article by Joost de Valk:
http://yoast.com/email-reliability/
This article discusses email reliability as it relates to sending email via WordPress. It's directly applicable in this situation because Gravity Forms uses the WordPress wp_mail() function to send email.
Look over that article AND discuss it with your web host if you are unsure how to implement what it suggests.
Gravity Forms itself can't send email. That is on your web server and it's completely out of our control as it's things that reside at the server level.
Also as Rob mentioned above it is very important that you configure the Send From to use an email address that is associated with that site OR associated with the SMTP settings you configure if you configure your WordPress site to send email via SMTP. This is discussed in the article I link to above.
Server issues are the only things that could cause such a delay. Gravity Forms doesn't queue e-mails, nor does wp-mail.php (WordPress' built-in sendmail utility).
