Common Cause

The most common cause of emails not being delivered to a site owner or site leader's inbox is the email filter. This could either be a junk or spam filter.

When a visitor completes a form on your site and submits it, an email is generated to you (the site leader) from mailings@sitemakerlive.com. Our mail server sends the email to the nominated email address immediately and once it leaves our servers we lose all control over what path it takes and whether or not it gets delivered. If the email client - the package or application you use to view, send and manage your emails - has strict filters then some 'safe' emails may never reach your inbox.

One way of ensuring your emails from 'sitemakerlive.com' arrive in your inbox is to check your spam and junk mail folders and if you find any emails from us just highlight or select them and mark them as 'not junk' or 'not spam'. The other useful way of ensuring that your emails arrive is to add 'sitemakerlive.com' to your list of safe domains.

We have also found that having your own email domain and forwarding your emails can have its problems also. Using an email address with your domain name - when you buy your own website domain name you may get email addresses as well - on your forms will mean mail is normally sent to your domain name provider where it will then be forwarded (by them) to your own private email account. Occasionally, the domain name providers hold the emails, scan them for viruses, or for phrases and words linked to spam email and then will either delete them if they think they pose a risk or pass them on. This presents two problems: 1) they decide if incoming emails are spam, not you and 2) your emails may be held in a queue for an undefined length of time. So the forwarding of emails could result in you either not getting your emails or getting them hours or days later.

How to test?

Create a hidden page on your site and add a couple of forms to the page. Set one up to go direct to your own private email address and set the other (if you have your own email domain) to use your domain email address. Save the page and then just send two messages, one from each form.

Next, just check how long it takes for those two emails to arrive in your private inbox (if you have forwarded the latter of the two email addresses). If problems exist with you receiving your forwarded email then you will need to speak to your domain name provider and check why emails from 'sitemakerlive.com' are either being delayed or not forwarded. Usually, advising them that emails from our domain are safe is enough to fix the problem.

The best advice is just test your emails on a regular basis to ensure that your service is working correctly.

Also, in the next release (version) of the Form, we will also be saving all the data collected (from the submitted email) to a file that you can download from your site, so you'll never have to worry about losing responses again!

Happy emailing!