Huge difference between emails sent in Flamingo and email inbox

  • Resolved Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)


    10 months ago

    I am trying to figure out why the Flamingo Inbound messages say 26 emails have been sent, but there are only 8 emails in my inbox. Those emails were bcc in CF7. The emails were BCCed to Gmail. I checked everything; inbox, spam, trash, but no track of the sent emails.

    On the email account that should receive all form email, only 1 email was received.

    I don’t know if this concerns CF7, Flamingo, WP, or your plugin. In the past, with only CF7, I didn’t have any problems. They started when I installed your plugin and Flamingo.

    I also don’t know if your plugin has any influence on sending emails. For instance, when a form is used, the data is stored in Flamingo, and then your plugin decides whether the email should be sent or not.

    Just now, I tried to resent an email which was not marked as spam but also not received in the inbox. Neither the one for the inbox nor the BCCed one arrived.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Plugin Author Erik

    (@codekraft)

    Ciao @wendihihihi,

    right, let me explain the process better:

    • When an e-mail is sent from a contact form, cf7 provides a hook with the content of the e-mail, to which you can return 0 or 1 non-spam and spam respectively
    • Antispam can now read the e-mail and evaluate it
    • If the mail is not spam it is sent and stored in flamingo inbound/inbox, otherwise it is NOT sent and is stored into flamingo spam (which is a catch all for all mails and none should be lost).

    If the mail is sent “normally” (not bcc) from a contact form, do you receive that one? it could be a problem of the gmail mailbox dropping incoming mails because the site does not have headers (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
    Give it a try with an smtp plugin and let me know if everything works on that side.

    Thread Starter Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)

    The number of normal emails that arrive in the inbox are less (1) than the bcc emails (8). The normal inbox is hosted by Microsoft and the bcc email by Gmail.

    I need to find a way to test it, maybe on a mirror site, because these emails are work emails and we receive about 15-20 a day via the form. Cannot miss those because they all have attachments and Flamingo doesn’t provide a system to store those.

    I checked the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, but they are all okay.

    I use WP Mail SMTP on a couple of websites, and I think I don’t have problems on those sites; I still need to check it next week. But I will install WP Mail SMTP on this site as well to see if the delivery works with it.

    It could be that Outlook business / Microsoft is the problem.

    I’ll monitor it and let you know the results. Still need to think about how to test it, because if I send test emails from whichever browser or email address, it never ends up in spam.

    Plugin Author Erik

    (@codekraft)

    This is the contact form 7 code as reference
    https://github.com/rocklobster-in/contact-form-7/blob/1c62e32317d37550b557dc0da1eb9e1b05d7342f/includes/submission.php#L718

    The antispam is a “simple” filter that gets the mail and can only return a bool value

    ps. we wrote to each other at the same time… OK, thank you for the additional info I will also do some testing today!

    • This reply was modified 10 months ago by Erik.
    Thread Starter Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)

    Okay, thank you Erik. I will have a look.

    But the one thing I then don’t understand and have to test with WP Mail SMTP is why form messages are marked as not spam but not sent.

    Plugin Author Erik

    (@codekraft)

    The reason is because if you sent the email with phpMailer (which is the default in WordPress) it could be that gmail would drop your incoming email without even letting it go to spam. If you use a smtp plugin this would not happen, that’s why! ??

    • This reply was modified 10 months ago by Erik.
    Thread Starter Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)

    So some are dropped and some not, probably.

    I am trying to send a test message now. See what WP Mail SMTP does.

    Thread Starter Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)

    A copy of the form works on a different site where I can use an SMTP plugin. So the problem is Outlook/Microsoft. Even with the right authorization won’t connect. Didn’t have that problem with Google.

    Plugin Author Erik

    (@codekraft)

    Yeah i know! If I have to be honest, the company I work for has the plan with office 365, and I have already hit this problem many times, for this that’s why I know. And that’s also why I made an smtp plugin that I basically use in our websites and it already has the “right” and “proven” presets for the ms-suite.

    Usually the solution is to configure correctly SPF, DKIM, DMARC because, probably, that domain you are using does not have the authority to send with that email domain name. Use mxtoolbox for checking that.

    May not be the cause but just a suggestion! let me know

    Thread Starter Wendihihihi

    (@wendihihihi)

    I just moved the form to one of our websites. Maybe in the future, I would use your plugin, but without you telling me that it still works, I wouldn’t use it because of the “hasn’t been tested…” warning ?? I can still try it out with a less busy form to see if your plugin can get the SMTP with Microsoft working. It might be that the IT guy only changed the password… But then again, next time, when he feels like changing the password again, we’ll get the same problem. I rather keep it in my own hands.

    I think the problem with why it didn’t work on my website was that the domain name is hosted with a host where I cannot even change the SPF, DKIM, or DMARC myself. The head of IT wants it like this… Then, the website is hosted with another host, and the emails are hosted at Microsoft. If all were with the same host, it wouldn’t be a problem, but even though I filled in the right details for Outlook SMTP, it was still refused.

    Anyways, it works now from a different website/host.

    Plugin Author Erik

    (@codekraft)

    Well look, the important thing is that you solved it, unfortunately sometimes you have to find the combination of plugins that works for that particular case.

    I hope in the future to expand the compat as much as possible and thanks for the reports that are always incredibly useful!

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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