A Technical Guy’s Blog

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.

Sorry to have sound a little harsh in the title. Trust me, if there are only two last DNS servers to use, check out OpenDNS. The nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Forget about our local ISPs’ DNS servers. They are geographically near you, but that doesn’t mean they are realiable!

DNS is important. A good one log you into your server without delay, resolving your web address in your web browser quicker! Yet, our local ISPs never seem to take care of this seriously. Your router, computers, servers around you require a pair of reliable DNS servers.

Change your DNS now:

1) In your Router

Enable OpenDNS in your router so every computer benefits. The OpenDNS website is kind enough to list every model of router and guide you through the process. Stop using the famous Streamyx’s DNS servers (202.188.0.133 & 202.188.1.5).

2) In your Computer

If you’re connecting to Internet directly without a router, you can enter OpenDNS’s DNS servers into your computer, instead of using ‘obtain DNS server address automatically’. This also applies to those on Wireless broadband such as Celcom and Maxis 3G, etc.

3) In your Server

For example, if you have Linux installed in your server, include OpenDNS’s DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf. I’m using TM’s DNS earlier and my dig and host command stop responding when TM’s DNS server decided to go teh tarik…

About OpenDNS

From the way how OpenDNS manage their website, showing the uptime of their globally loacated servers - rest assure this is the last time to change your DNS!