Form submissions from Gmail users will start failing soon… Here’s the fix.

Dakirby309-Simply-Styled-GmailWhen a potential customer fills out your contact form, how important is it that you get notified? How much money could you potentially lose if you don’t receive one important email notification from your site? An upcoming change from Gmail could affect your site very soon.

Following in the footsteps of AOL & Yahoo, Gmail will soon change a policy that will stop contact form submissions and other emails from “looking like” they are coming from a Gmail email address. In short, if your contact form uses the submitter’s email address in the “TO” field for the notification, it will fail and won’t ever hit your inbox.

AOL already made this change for AOL email addresses in 2014, as did Yahoo. As such, you may want to check your contact form plugin’s entries list and see if you missed some important notifications…

What’s the fix?

The policy change – or, in technical terms, the “DMARC policy being updated to ‘reject'” – means your automated emails must be coming from a different domain besides @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @aol.com.

To prevent the emails from failing, set the “TO” address in your contact form to [email protected] or simply set it to your own email address.

gmail-dmarc-policy

Bonus tip: to make life easier when you’re responding to the email notification, set the “Reply To” to the submitter’s email. When you hit the reply button in your email app, it’ll be set up to reply to the submitter rather than the noreply email address.

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