Problem With email

[jfnewell1965]

Having a problem with sending email from my site.  In this case it is from the contact form, but I imagine it would be an issue for all messages sent by the system.  But let's just stick with the contact form for now....

It is an interesting note that I had this same issue with OpenCart when I tried to get that running.

The issues is (refer to the attached picture) that when a message is sent from the contact page, both the sender (From:) and the recipient (To:) are both the same email address. 

The second listing looks like it has different names, but they are both really just the same name (i.e. [email protected])

When this is the case, my email client refuses to pick up the message.  And, since my personal email address is listed in the contact information of my hosting provider, I get a spam email copy of the message in my personal email.

The way I solved it in OpenCart was to change the email code to put the "From:" address as the customer entered email address, so the email server/client saw:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Doing this made it all work.   But I am not sure what, if any, other issues I may have created by doing this, and didn't want to change core code of TB if I could avoid it.

If it matters, my email client is MS Outlook, but I tried another email client, and while the other email client downloaded the message, it flagged it as "having issues" (not sure of the actual wording).

Does anyone else have issues like this when the "From:" and "To:" are the same address?

If yes, what did you do to fix it?

If no, any recommendations?



 

[colorful-ant]

I have no problem with my shops - the emails work

whether it is with the module mailalert or a module for automatic quantity update etc.

[colorful-ant]

additional:
for displaying mails
ms outlook I use only for private mail addresses
For the business mails I use thunderbird

[jfnewell1965]

An investigation in to the mail header revealed the following:

"Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning [email protected] does not designate 23.83.209.150 as permitted sender) client-ip=23.83.209.150;"

It turns out my host (A2 Hosting) uses a company called "Mailchannels" (the IP address 23.83.209.150) to filter for spam.

An update to the SPF record of my DNS records and a wait for name servers to populate fixed this problem.

 

[lesley]

They changed to them a few months ago and it wreaked havoc with figuring out why a lot of people's emails broke. 

[jfnewell1965]

@lesley  After seeing your post, I decided to ask, before the ticket closed, the following:

"Since the choice and decision of mail filters is at A2 Hosting's discretion, should I expect that any future changes will include automation for updating SPF record entries if they should require an update?"

The answer back was a hopeful, yet decidedly unreassuring:

"Please note that even if we change from Mailchannels to any other provider in the future, we will probably do all we can to minimize customer impact. "

You gotta love that "...we will probably do all we can...".   That is almost as good as "might, maybe"!  😉

Hope this all helps someone fighting email issues.