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Proofpoint, Inc.

You Are Not Receiving Emails from a Website Contact Form

Situation You have a Webform (using PHP/ASP/etc) on your hosted website that is configured to send to your email account, but you are not receiving these emails. 
Solution If mail flow tests are successful, the mail agent on your web server may think that it is responsible for mail addressed to your domain and try to deliver it locally. This is a default settling on the webserver and can be changed.

 

Mail flow test

To rule out any mail-flow issues perform the following tests:

  • Send a message to your email account from an external personal email account.
  • Modify the webform to send mail to a personal email (Gmail for example) account

If both of the above tests are successful, the issue is likely due to the default mail delivery settings on your webserver. 

Webserver mail Delivery Settings

Because your website and your email address share the same domain name, by default the mail agent running on the server hosting your website thinks it is responsible for mail addressed to your domain name. 

When someone submits the form on your website, the mail agent will recognize the domain name and conclude that it should be sending mail to itself. 

How to resolve

To resolve this issue, you will need to notify the mail agent running on the webserver that it is not responsible for handling mail for your domain. For instructions how to do this, you will need to contact your web host or web developers. If you host your own website, contact the support team for your mail server software. 

Script-Generated Emails

If you experience difficulties with script-generated emails being processed by Proofpoint Essentials (i.e. not reaching recipients who are Proofpoint Essentials Customers), please ensure that your script specifies a valid mailbox for the Return Path of any generated emails. If a valid Return Path is not specified, Proofpoint Essentials will not be able to process your email. For more on specifying a valid Return Path, please see this article.

Other Checks

If the above does not resolve the problem, then try these additional troubleshooting options:

  • The IP address you are using is not on any of our blocklists (check here).
  • Check the sending domain has proper DNS configured (please see DNS Sanity check).
  • Check your outbound logs to see if you make a connection to our MX records, or for any other connection issues.