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Notification email 'from' field being changed

  1. Hi!

    My form notifications are set up with the 'from' name being pulled from a field as well as the email address. So Jane Doe, janedoe@gmail.com, fills out the form, the notification that is supposed to come to me would list the 'from' name as Jane Doe and the 'from' email as janedoe@gmail.com.
    At some point in the last month, all notifications ceased sending to me, and so I set up an SMTP plugin to handle the emailing. I am getting notifications just fine now, so that's good.
    But, now when the email comes to me, it lists the 'from' name and email as those that are used by the SMTP plugin. So it appears to me that I'm filling out my own form repeatedly and sending it to myself. The reply address also defaults to my own address, rather than the client entered address.
    I have gathered this is a problem somewhere on the server side and not with Gravity Forms, but I'm not sure exactly what I should be looking to change on the server side to get that fixed if it's possible. I use DreamHost.
    Can anyone give me some guidance on what I should be telling DreamHost in a support email?

    Thanks a bunch!
    -Kate

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday October 5, 2012 | Permalink
  2. 3cstudio
    Member

    Kate, dealing with a somewhat similar issue now with Dreamhost -- read:
    http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2012/04/04/improvements-to-outgoing-spam-prevention-policy/
    ... where they are disallowing From: email via the major webmail providers to cut back on spam and blacklist config issues.

    On the form I'm working on, we recently noticed that some email wasn't getting through using their address as the From: address. Further checking found that Gmail was one of the 'offenders'. Yet further digging found that link (above) -- could not believe that it is 6 months in the making, and we have potentially missed scores of email attempts "From:" these webmail providers Dreamhost has decided to block (and not warn us?), plus it throws no errors -- just the usual Thank You for your submission. Is it possible this is some of what you're encountering as well?

    Since that form was PHP driven, and we're moving to Wordpress > Gravity Forms, my first move was to insure that the form was sending via a static, organizational email address rather than the sender's email address field in the From Email field on Notifications.

    Not sure if this speaks directly to your issue, but fwiw re: Dreamhost vs. webmail providers in the From: form field in general.

    Steve C.

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday October 5, 2012 | Permalink
  3. @kate, if you are using the Gmail SMTP server, they will rewrite the FROM address to that account. If you use another SMTP server, they may have different policies and you may find that they will not rewrite your FROM header.

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday October 5, 2012 | Permalink
  4. I had the same issue, except it's been happening since June (they started rolling out this change in April 2012). I've dealt with it by using WP-Mail-SMTP, using 'localhost' and port 25, unencrypted, and my ftp username and password, and that works. The from email address has to be on a domain hosted at Dreamhost.

    Anyway, what STILL doesn't work is when the reply-to is set to the potential client's e-mail address, if their email is Hotmail or Yahoo (possibly more, but Gmail works). I spoke with their support to find out where these emails were headed, and they're marked as spam and "eaten." Lucky that GravityForms stores responses online. Thanks for that.

    To lower the spam score, she said the HTML formatting of the email was questionable/wrong and there was no plain text version. I'm here to find out if I can reformat the email to lower the spam score and I'll search and post somewhere else, I just wanted to share what I found.

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday October 19, 2012 | Permalink