Email: Contact Form – From Field

As of today Escapia’s Lead Gen Tool requires each email FROM address to be unique to interpret the lead data correctly.

But, are the emails being sent from yahoo.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com?

No. They’re being sent from a contact form on a customer website/domain – ie. CustomerVacationRentals.com

In reality, Escapia should not depend on websites to send on behalf of other websites (the old school way) because (nowadays) that will get the sending server (IP) blocked for being considered a spammer.

Why does the FROM address have to belong to the sending domain?

For example – if an email had “your-name@yahoo.com” in the From field, but send from eastislandsrentals.com (not yahoo.com), it is highly probable the relaying email servers will eventually consider it as a spoofed address – because that’s exactly how spammers do it.

At risk – if you are flagged as a spammer, the IP address of the sending server could be blocklisted by relaying mail servers which can take days/weeks/months to be removed from IF you can prove to those list-services that you are not a spammer.

However, with those risks in mind, we can override the validation and send using a workaround:

• add a filter to disable the sender validation
• add a Q4 managed SMTP server (with revolving IP addresses) – so as not to get the web server itself Blocklisted (0-100 emails sent per day @ $10pm, options if more are needed).

That should explain & solve for it.

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For Dev Setup:

Step 1: Get SendGrid API Key

• Log into SendGrid.com – creds on the hosting sheet
• Settings > API Keys – create a new API key, name is customernameapikey
• Copy the API key

Step 2: Setup WordPress SendGrid Plugin

• Install SendGrid Plugin
• Open sendgrid > settings
• Paste API key, add addtional setting info
• Send a test message

Step 3: Update Contact Form 7

• Update the forms to use the submitter’s email address:
• e.g. FROM: [firstname] [llastname] <[email]>