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.

Answer:
Your email not down but is other reasons which cause you having email problem. I would like to explain some of my experience regarding the reason on email sending and receiving problems.

1. Using Webmail
- If you face difficulty to send out email no matter with or without attachment, probably is your internet connection having unstable connectivity. For more accurate result, you can check your connection speed by ping from your machine to the destination for example if I’m using mail.1.com.my as my webmail browser, in my command prompt, i need to type in ping mail.1.com.my and once the result end, check on the “time” which calculate in ms(millisecond), normally for local hosting would be less then 50ms, as for foreign hosting would probably not more then 250ms(if you are in Malaysia). If the return result is 3xxms above, you would need to check with your ISP (internet service provider) for more assistant OR you need to check on your internet devices such as your switch, modem, hub, network card, network cable and etc. Don always complain is the email server down!

2. Using Email Client
- Most users facing send out email problem which it keep load load load and load. It is killing your times and suddenly there is a pop up error message said something about connectin time out; connectin delay and etc. Remember, don’t always said is the email server down! Before you judge on something, you must have prove and evidence. What you can do is to do 2 test from your machine see whether is it your own problem or the server really is down.

i) first go to your “Start” button there, click on “Run..” and type in cmd, after that hit on enter. You will saw a command prompt pop up, secondly type ping smtp.youremailserver.com in the command prompt and hit enter. You will notice some reply from the command prompt, refer to the paragraph on top for explaination.

ii) after this ping result, type tracert smtp.youremailserver.com in the command prompt and hit enter. This test will take a little bit longer, it will test up to 30 line maximum. So give a little bit patience for it, perhaps you go to the toilet and wash up your face after the anger of sending email failure. Back to the test, if you notice there is request time out from the first few row, it should be your internal connection problem. If request time out only appear at last few lines, that’s mean your email server or the connection nearby to the email server having interruption or downtime.

All above is some little small test which you can check and test instantly whether is it your server down or your’s connection itself having problem.

I would like to emphasize again, don’t simply assume the email server is down if you facing email problem and don’t blame your email provider company on this issue. Check before you blame or scold! Stay cool.