Over the last few months we’ve helped a number of clients experiencing email problems on their websites.
Problems can occur for a variety of reasons but usually fall into the below categories:
-
- Spam emails coming via contact forms
- Order notifications not being received by customers
- Emails going into junk mail
Being able to send and receive business emails, transactional emails and updates is essential for any website.
By missing emails, or being overloaded with spam, you risk losing real leads and your level of customer engagement can drop.
The great thing about email is it’s very flexible, low-cost and quick.
Therefore it makes sense to use email throughout your business flows, to engage with customers and keep them up to date.
Firstly, we have to identify why email errors can occur on your website.
The main reason we find is that emails from the website are sent through your web server.
Although this was fine to do in the past, in more recent times sending email via the default routes such as PHP Mail tends to fail.
Also, as many clients use shared hosting platforms, any issue with one account being blacklisted for spam will affect other accounts on that server.
In effect your IP is blocked or penalised due to the bad habits of another neighbour account on your server.
Fix email deliverability issues on your website
The simplest method is to use a separate SMTP server to send emails, rather than your web server.
If you route your emails through a dedicated relay you have a greater chance of them being delivered.
There are a few different ways to do this and they depend on your website platform.
Example:
If you have a website on WordPress and your contact form emails are not being received you can route them through your company email such as info@mybusiness.com.
WordPress has a number of great plugins which make the set up process really straightforward.
Emails from the contact form will then use the same SMTP server as your mailbox, rather than your website.
Another excellent option is to use Mailjet’s free email relay.
This can not only save you money but ensure you get good email deliverability by a trusted email provider.
Fix too much spam coming via your website
Many website owners suffer from spam coming in via their website forms.
Once a spambot finds a weak form it can keep sending through random emails without any blocker.
A simple solution to this is to use Google Recaptcha.
You can use a plugin or other integration to add this to your form, and depending on the type of captcha selected it will add the well-known ‘are you a human’ check.
This relatively quick and easy solution can be a great way to reduce stress and annoying spam clogging up your mailbox every morning.
How to fix emails going into junk mail
This is a slightly trickier issue and usually requires a look at your DNS settings.
Essentially, you can improve email deliverability by adding DKIM and SPF records to your DNS.
A great tool to see how well your email records are set up is MXToolbox.
By checking this website you can quickly determine if your domain is on any spam blacklists, whether the right records are set up, and whether there are any other configuration issues.
If you need specific help with emails not being sent through your website please feel free to get in touch with us at StudioRav and we can give you hands on help.