We use online forms to capture leads, from enquiries to successful sales order. Have you ever wonder what if the delivery mechanism fail and the leads are not delivered to you?

See, submission are sent to you by email. What if the email agent used by your online form is not working as expected? Will you be informed if the email was not sent successfully? As online forms taking care of all the important sales conversion, it is important for you to understand how it works.

Using built-in SMTP

If your website is hosted in a Linux server (you can tell if your website ends with .php, in most case), changes you are using Sendmail as the email agent of your online forms. Sendmail do trigger Error message if a message failed to deliver for some reasons. Anyway, the messages will go to the administrator of the server, not you - most of the time.

Another problem with build-in SMTP server is, when your web hosting and email hosting are in the same server. Your web form will most likely ’smart’ enough to route the submission of online forms to your mailbox. This will cause problem if you have some changes to your Mail Exchange pointing.

Using external SMTP

Just imagine the online form is now your email clients, such as Outlook Express. Everytime, an enquiry waiting to be delivered to you, your online form will connect to a specified SMTP, authorized as usual, and get the message delivered to you. You will have more control in this case, and your email hosting service provider will most likely provide you some status report for the uptime of your email server.

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