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Not Receiving Some Form Submission

  1. I discovered yesterday that we simply don't receive the emails following form submissions on some of our forms. I have two business websites, with GF installed on both.

    On my property management website, repair requests were sometimes arriving, sometimes not. This was a gmail/spam issue and I solved it with filters in gmail.

    But while investigating, I discovered a bunch of entries in the backend of my General Contact form (Forms->Entries when mousing over the form area).

    I've verified that the email destination email address for admin notification works (by manually sending various emails). The host checked the logs and says the emails are leaving the server after a form submission. But the form submission emails do NOT arrive in my email.

    I've changed the destination email to a different one and tested again. Same outcome as before, the email address works, but admin notification to that email do not arrive. Meanwhile, the other form does work just fine, so that tells me it's not a global issue with the plugin or my server.

    I don't know my next troubleshooting step. We've lost a ton of business because we simply ignored (didn't receive) inquiries from our website. Looks like the issue began in June 2012.

    Any thoughts or ideas?

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday August 16, 2012 | Permalink
  2. As far as notifications go, Gravity Forms does not actually send the email notifications. That is 100% handled by your web server. Gravity Forms uses the WordPress wp_mail() function, a built in WordPress function, to ask your web server to send the email notification.

    This 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. Also, sometimes they can get spammed, which you have noted.

    After that, it is entirely up to your web server to reliably send the email. Unfortunately, many web hosts are simply unreliable at handling email properly when sent via PHP. This results in unreliable performance.

    The most reliable way to configure WordPress to handle sending email is going to be to use SMTP. You would do this by installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin and then contacting your web host to get the appropriate SMTP settings. You would then need to configure the Send From of your notifications so that it uses an address associated with that SMTP account.

    If that plugin does not work for you can test for theme/plugin conflicts to see if something is interfering:

    http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/Testing_for_a_Theme/Plugin_Conflict

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday August 16, 2012 | Permalink
  3. Thanks for the reply. After further investigation I found in the Notifications settings that the "From Name" was set to "Select a Field" in the right side dropdown on the forms that were not getting delivered. Changing that to "Name" seems to have cured the problem.

    Could that in fact have been the entire cause?

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday August 16, 2012 | Permalink
  4. Sure, that would mean the email had no name attached to it - which could be problematic. Glad you got it sorted out, thanks for letting us know!

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday August 16, 2012 | Permalink

This topic has been resolved and has been closed to new replies.