There is one type of problem that is particularly troublesome. Not because it is so difficult to fix, but because it makes itself completely invisible.<\/p>\n
A website that\u2019s offline alerts you straight away. The customer calls, the monitoring system raises the alarm, and you know about it within minutes. A website whose contact form sends enquiries into thin air never alerts you. It looks just the same as always. The form loads, the \u2018Submit\u2019 button works, and the visitor sees the confirmation message \u2018Thank you for your enquiry\u2019. But nothing actually reaches you.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s the real catch: an enquiry that never arrives looks exactly the same to you as one that was never written. It\u2019s just quiet. And every business has its quiet weeks.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly what happened at a local restaurant. The owner got in touch because he\u2019d noticed that nothing had been coming in via the website for a while. No alerts, no errors, just a hunch.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long to diagnose the problem. An access token between the form and the email inbox had expired. From that day onwards, every single submission was stored correctly but never delivered. Eight enquiries lay unnoticed in the database, the oldest of which was several weeks old. These included booking enquiries and a request for a corporate event.<\/p>\n
I was able to retrieve the enquiries from the database and prepare them. The owner contacted them all. For some, it was too late; for others, it wasn\u2019t. But for a business of this size, eight enquiries are not a rounding error but real money.<\/p>\n
This week I had a second case on my desk, with a different cause but the same effect.<\/p>\n
A website sends out more emails than most people realise. Form notifications, confirmations to the sender, system messages, password reset links, and order confirmations from the online shop.<\/p>\n
To ensure these messages do not end up in the spam folder, recipients now carry out rigorous checks to verify whether the sender is genuine. This involves three mechanisms, which can be thought of in the same way as sending a letter.<\/p>\n
That is exactly what happened with a client\u2019s website, which I look after<\/a>. The web server sent the system messages using the company\u2019s domain, but was not authorised to do so anywhere. Its own DMARC rule was set to \u2018reject\u2019. The result: the recipients flatly rejected the messages. They weren\u2019t sorted into the spam folder; they weren\u2019t accepted at all.<\/p>\n With system messages, it\u2019s annoying. With contact forms, it costs you business.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need a technician to find out if your form is working. All you need is two minutes.<\/p>\n If the message reaches its destination everywhere, everything is fine. If it ends up in your spam folder, you have a delivery problem. If you don\u2019t receive anything at all, you\u2019ve been missing enquiries since an unknown point in time.<\/p>\n Do this test every three months. It\u2019s best to make a note of it in your diary straight away, because that\u2019s precisely where the crux of the problem lies. Nobody thinks to check something that never reports an error.<\/p>\nThe two-minute test<\/h2>\n
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Why I\u2019m raising this issue<\/h2>\n