SOS! Forms not sending confirm emails!

Emergency! Forms not sending information! Please Help!

[chicoco25]

I have set up various forms for the website i do updates for. There are various forms set up to send:

1) a confirmation email to the person filling out the form
2)Send the results to an outside company for billing
3)Write the results to a database located on the server for logging

For some reason, all the forms(or at least the ones Ive checked) have stopped sending the confirmation and the email to the outside billers. The only thing still functional is the writing to the database...and the 'Thank you' page that comes up after submission of the form. Most of the forms havent been touched recently, so im assuming its a bigger problem. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE...if you have any suggestions, please share. What could the problem be?!

[skipfactor]

Perhaps your host made permission changes to your smtprelayhost? Mine requires authentication for outgoing so I have to use the same smtp server as the site domain:

smtprelayhost = "mail.mydomain.com" --works

smtprelayhost = "mail.anotherdomain.com" --fails

added: you should only post your question once to one forum. :)

[edited by: skipfactor at 1:46 am (utc) on Sep. 3, 2003]

[Mark_A]

You may need to include more detail to get better help chicoco25 ..

what scripts or languages are used to process the forms?

When something starts failing .. something somewhere has usually changed ..

can you find a way to step through the individual actions that each form submission process makes - one by one - so that you can see which specific steps fail?

That should give you better clues as to where to look for what has changed.

[I just recently had a forms problem that traced back to a fault which I had not imagined could have caused that failure mode .. it cost a lot of time]

[chicoco25]

thanks folks...i know its hard to answer with such limited imformation. I guess what Im trying to detect is generally where a problem that affects so many forms might originate. I dont really touch anything beyond the HTML on the particular form Im setting up. I didnt set up any of the CGI scripts, nor have I touched them at all. I believe they are some sort of Perl programing. Im going to have questions to answer in the morning at the least. Im just trying to figure which direction the error might be coming from. Is the problem most likely bigger than me (server)? Not neccessarily? Can you scrape together any limited assistance or insight from what I said?

[Mark_A]

well what you have said is that

1. the database us updated
2. the user is passed to the thank you page

3. the feedback email to the user fails
4. the mail to the biller fails

So it does seem to be related generally to email

it may be related to a change that your host has made to the servers perhaps as some security upgrade?

it may be related to some nameserver issues .. mail server issues ..

Does your hosting provider have a feedback issue raising system, if so get a contact in to them, perhaps they changed something and thats caused your problem.

Call them if they are open now.

Does all the data you need get saved into the DB .. if so its not totally catastrophic as you could manually catch up with the emails .. check by comparing your raw access logs to entries in the DB before you are sure ..

If it does not .. I would consider if you should take it offline somehow until its sorted out ...

[chicoco25]

Thanks Mark....good calming, soothing advice. If anyone else has feedback or suggestions, please post. I can use the help. Thanks.

[martinibuster]

If all you touched was the html, then it is very likely the hidden input fields. Many forms, for security purposes, only send email from within certain parameters, i.e. the email recipients, etc.

If you have a backup copy of the old forms that did work, check the hidden input fields against the ones that don't work.

[Edouard_H]

If the scripts are utilizing sendmail instead of SMTP it's possible that it could be the path to sendmail if the host changed configuation.

[DaveAtIFG]

This question was also posted in the HTML and Browsers forum at [webmasterworld.com...] and that discussion seems to be gathering steam so I've locked this thread. Please post additional comments to the thread in Browsers.