email from form never arrives...why?

[jgstyle]

We have a client that cannot receive email that is sent from their web contact form. I pretty much tried everything I could think of, which is to say not much.

I made sure that the email was spelled correctly in the form and checked the syntax of the form code. BTW this is using formmail.

The strange thing is that when I put in MY email address and the recipient, I DO receive the email, but any email address from the clients domain used as the recipient does not get the email.

The form does not error for me, it merely continues on to the thank you page. However, my client says that on his laptop he receives some kind of "referrer" error, and then is taken or pointed to Matt's Script Archive.. But not on his desktop machines.

The web host is extremely unhelpful, which the client knows, but maybe this has nothing to do with them? I really don't know...

What the devil could be wrong? Any ideas? Thanks for any help!

-John

[kamakaze]

Can you post the code? What version of browsers are being used?

[jgstyle]

Here is the code that is in there:

<FORM ACTION="http://www.widget.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl" METHOD="POST">
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="recipient" VALUE="[e-mail]">
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="redirect" VALUE="http://www.widget.com/thankyou.html">
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="subject" VALUE="A Widget Website Response">
</FORM>

Any email address from "widget.com" will NOT receive the email. But when I put in any address from another domain, it works fine...

I'm using Safari 1.3, Firefox 1.0.4 and IE 5.2.3 on Mac OS 10.3. I know the client is using Windows XP on all his machines, and I assume some flavor of IE 6 (whatever would have come with his machines).

I have no idea why this won't work...thanks for the reply!

-John

[oddsod]

Is the form on an asp page? I had the same problem, and an unhelpful host. When I changed the page to htm it worked.

[jgstyle]

The page has a '.html' extension. So you think changing this may have something to do with it?

[oddsod]

I don't know but it can't hurt to try. And to copy the entire page and try it on another site/different server.

[incrediBILL]

No formmail should have this specified in the web page:
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="recipient" VALUE="[e-mail]">

What you have there is a wide open spam machine!

You really need to replace whatever formmail you're using ASAP with something that specifies the recipient (you) on the server side only and not passed as a variable that can be modified. I've seen this type of page abused more than a few times as a spammer starts pumping their emails to your formmail script and specifying the recipient per email.

This type of formmail setup is a nice way to get blacklisted, lose your hosting account, or worse with CAN-SPAM ...

[caran1]

I had a similar problem, email to ISP email address never reached , when I changed to free email a/c like hotmail/ yahoo, I received the mails properly

[jgstyle]

This has got to be problem on the host end I would guess. I even put in my personal email address and I got the emails. Interesting...

incrediBILL:

We'll definitely need to look into this for our other sites, any pointers on where to learn how to set that up?...however, when I say this is our *client*...well, we designed their website AGES ago, but since we are a small town we local businesses still try to help each other out. I'm not able to modify his script setup with the host he's using. And he's not changing to another host just to fix this problem, it just ain't gonna happen. Not to mention that my bosses may not allow me to invest too much more time into this...we'll help, up to a point lol...I was hoping this was just some simple fix that I was overlooking.

caran1:

It may come to changing the recipient email for them. Or they may have to resort to the dreaded email link for contact in lieu of their form. I feel bad for them that I can't get it to work, but I'm only going to be able to spend so much time on this...