Can’t figure this one out, and I’m wondering if anyone has seen anything like it.
Backstory
Our website, dancinwoofs.com has a contact form that sends emails to info@dancinwoofs.com. It used to work perfectly and on September 14th, emails completely stopped.
The problem was in the MX Records, those have since been corrected.
Problem
We can no longer receive contact form submissions to info@.
To test this, we changed the email address in webflow settings to send emails to officedog@dancinwoofs.com and emails flow perfectly. But when we change it back to info@dancinwoofs.com once again, the emails no longer arrive.
First thought is that someone may have clicked “unsubscribe” in the email notification footer. But as far as I’m aware, that simply deletes the receiver’s email from the form notification settings, and you can re-add it when needed.
Next thought is you may be able to whitelist the email & domain for the notification to make sure it’s not getting discarded. Unfortunately I’ve seen several cases where both Google’s email, and Office 365 email, just ignore the whitelist and bin certain email senders anyway.
I see this problem often enough that I basically avoid any reliance on email notifications, and instead push notification into alternative systems, depending on the client. For some it’s notifications in a Slack channel, where they can see, assign, and click on the email to contact clients. For others it’s Saleforce, Pipedrive, or Nutshell. All of these tend to be much better choices.
Worst case, you can use Zapier/Make, and just have it send email through an alternative platform which isn’t getting blocked, like your own email account. At the same time, log the contact, date and time in a Google sheet so you can audit once in awhile and see if any are getting lost.
This all makes sense, and it was kind of my “worst case scenario” situation.
I’ve already whitelisted (“Allowlisted” according to Google) webflow.com, and the problem still exists.
Maybe someone unsubscribed from those submissions, which is plausible, but as you said, when we changed the send to email address to something different, then back again, you would think that it has been re-added.
Yes I’m curious what happens if you change your notifications to a different email address on the same domain, even an alias on the same account, like notify@clientemail.com. If they receive any, then it sounds like Webflow permanently blocked the email receiver, probably due to an unsubscribe event. I’m just guessing.
Have you checked and verified that the email still shows as a receiver in your Form notifications? I’ve had situations where e.g. a secretary keeps clicking unsubscribe… like a reflex.
When you say “Have you checked and verified that the email still shows as a receiver in your Form notifications?” what/where exactly are you talking about?
If a client unsubscribes, their email will be removed here, but you can add it back and save so that you’ll begin receiving notifications again. Until they again unsubscribe…
Just want to add that one of the mistakes webdevs make here is in making it easy for clients to forward these emails to a client. If you set the Reply To address to the end-customer’s email, and your client hits reply, then they reply to these end-customer messages easily. BUT then the end-customer can click that unsubscribe link, and it kills your client’s lead channel.
That’s the funny thing though. I’ve entered a different email there, with the same domain address, and it works perfectly. Then when I switch back, it doesn’t work.
So I’m pretty much totally confused right now haha.
Your best bet is to reach out to Webflow support on this. It may simply come down to being an issue that is on their end – caching old MX records or something else totally out of your control.
I did a test yesterday to double-check that Webflow isn’t permablocking unsubscribes.
If you have bob@foo.com as a form notification recipient, and he unsubscribes, you can go back into the site’s form configuration and re-add him with no problems. So the notification is not being blocked at the Webflow end.
My best guess is that the client has done something like… mark it as spam, or route it into a different folder, and they are confused because they no longer see them again. You can probably tell if your create an alias, e.g. leads@ on the same account you’re having troubles with. If you configure your site to direct leads there, and those are also not appearing, than it must be a Google Workspace account-level config issue.
