Mail form fails unless mail is to my domain

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Chuck C
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  • Answered

I have a simple perl/cgi mail form on my site, which is very rarely used.  It sends an e-mail to my personal e-mail on another domain.


The form is very rarely used.  The last real message I received was in December 2018.

Yesterday, I decided to test it, and, although the form claimed, success, I received no e-mail.


After a lot of debugging, it turns out that I can only send mail via the form to my own (inMotion-hosted) domain.


I can imagine that this is a security measure to keep me from building/hosting a spam-bot. 


So I have a couple of questions:

* When did this change go into effect?

* Why wasn't I told?

* Is there any way I can find out if anyone has tried to contact me in the last 16 months, and what they might have included in their messages?
 

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anonymous
Quote from Chuck C

I found the settings to fix the problem, not where the link describes, however.

From cPanel, go to Email Deliverability, then to "Manage" for the domain showing the warning (at the far right of the table).  Scroll down to SPF, and there was a description of what needed to be done, and a button to do it.  Once I found where, one click fixed it.

I still don't have an answer to why we weren't notified about the change.  Or how one accesses the e-mail exim log.  I was able to access SMTP logs to see that the form was accessed a few times over the course of the year.  I would love to be able to identify those messages.

Usually, we recommend our customers use SMTP authentication to avoid dealing with this issue at all. If you've asked use about this before setting this up and wasn't told, that's our mistake. We don't have control over changes to cPanel, though.

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Chuck C

I found the settings to fix the problem, not where the link describes, however.

From cPanel, go to Email Deliverability, then to "Manage" for the domain showing the warning (at the far right of the table).  Scroll down to SPF, and there was a description of what needed to be done, and a button to do it.  Once I found where, one click fixed it.

I still don't have an answer to why we weren't notified about the change.  Or how one accesses the e-mail exim log.  I was able to access SMTP logs to see that the form was accessed a few times over the course of the year.  I would love to be able to identify those messages.

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anonymous
Quote from Chuck C

What is SMTP authentication, and why do I need to implement it now, when I didn't in the past?

Where is "our overall email authentication article"?

How do I check an email exim log?

Again, this worked, for a couple of years, and then stopped.  I've found in the logging that I have probably missed about a half-dozen messages from users, which as far as I know are completely unrecoverable and untraceable.

Mostly, I wonder why I wasn't advised when things changed?

Please see the articles linked in my first message and contact Live Support for further assistance as I'm unable to view account info from this platform.

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Chuck C

What is SMTP authentication, and why do I need to implement it now, when I didn't in the past?

Where is "our overall email authentication article"?

How do I check an email exim log?

Again, this worked, for a couple of years, and then stopped.  I've found in the logging that I have probably missed about a half-dozen messages from users, which as far as I know are completely unrecoverable and untraceable.

Mostly, I wonder why I wasn't advised when things changed?

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anonymous
  • Answered

Hello and thanks for contacting us.

You can contact our Live Support at any time for further assistance.