Problems receiving form emails

My form emails are only being received intermittently. I have checked the Yahoo server, and they are not in the junk or spam folders. I’m using Outlook 365, and I have checked all of my folders, and only a few are showing up, with no apparent pattern. I always get a success message after clicking the send button,

The form is on my collection page. It needs to go into production tomorrow.


Here is my site Read-Only: Webflow - CoSponsor

Mail delivery issues can be frustrating. Mail is a best effort service only, the only way to know if it was sent from Webflow’s Infrastructure would be to open a trouble ticket to see if the could investigate their logs for receipt confirmation from the destination mail server responsible for accepting delivery for the destination email address.

If they did get acknowledgment, then the problem is on your providers end or rule processing in your client. If not they would be able to see the error code indicating the problem,

You could check submissions on a frequent basis in the meantime. You could also look into a service like zapier to notify you or the client with an alternate method upon a submission event. The api is available as well if you are a coder.

What does “best effort service” mean? Gosh, we’ll do our best, but who knows?

I have since changed mail recipient from Yahoo to AOL and the problem continues. I have sent a message to support but no response. I thought this was one of Webflows fundamental services, and I am paying for it. Why should I have to go to a third party to get it to work?

SMTP (the delivery part of mail to external addresses) does not have guaranteed delivery as part of the specification. It is just like postal mail services. There are plenty of reasons why mail cannot be delivered by one system to another.

The sending SMTP server can only try. For this reason, it has never been used for serious transactions. For a list of reasons you could read the RFC or take a look at the Wikipedia page.

It is important to note that each SMTP gateway processes mail based on decisions made by the mail admins. So these can change anytime. So can things like spam filters. I formerly managed and deployed mail services to the largest ISP’s in the world. So i have a bit of experience. I gave you the pointers. If Webflow can’t or wont provide a delivery status on a particular message then the only alternative to you is to check with your mail providers support desk to see if they received mail for your account for blocked it.

It is a poor practice to depend on mail delivery to see if you have requests to process. That is why submissions are stored in a database you can check. Form submissions are there. That is really the only way to ever be sure.

I appreciate your response, but this seems pretty lame. As an alternative I am using a button with a email address meaning that the user will fill in the subject line herself and send it using her own email provider. Most mobile devices now use IMAP, which should be more reliable than SMTP. But in any case, if the Webflow form submission process is this unreliable they have an obligation to inform their users about it. I’m glad I only paid for one month for my site.

You can use usebasin.com to handle your forms. It’s a very simple setup. Just add the address they provide to the Webflow form.

All form engines using mail notifications and mail systems are subject to the same issue. Mail delivery is not a “Webflow” issue if they tried to deliver and it and the remote server accepted it. Whether it made it to you or not, after that point is something they can’t control.

I count form fills and match them to submissions. Have not had an issue with Webflow. I am not here to defend them. I am just giving you the info.

For your information, IMAP is a client protocol to access a mailbox and act on contents. So is POP3. SMTP is used to deliver messages between different mail servers, and your client also connects to your mail providers SMTP server to send outgoing mail. If you look at your mail client settings for an account, you can see there are incoming mail settings and outgoing mail settings.
Since you mentioned sporadic deliveries to the inbox, with different providers on your end, I would confirm that no client is accessing the inbox with POP3.

If you have any clients using POP3 to access your submission mailbox, their mail clients could inadvertently be deleting downloaded messages. This is a default setting, on many mail clients with that protocol. IMAP does not delete downloaded messages when displaying them. An IMAP client just fetches the message headers, which are shown in your inbox. The complete message remains on the server unless you implicitly delete it.

Jumping to conclusions is easy, but often not helpful. Good luck.

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