Contact Form Troubleshooting

When first testing a contact form, or after the site is already published, you may find that some messages being sent via the contact form are not reaching you.

Setup Issues

It may be that when setting up your contact form, you have entered the "send to" e-mail address incorrectly. Messages meant for you would be sent to an incorrect address, which would prevent you from receiving them.

If the email address is not a functioning address, then your website visitor will (usually) get a notification that their email message bounced — but you won't. If your visitor has no other way of contacting you, then you will not be able to hear from them.

If the email address is a legitimate address, but not an address that you check, then neither you nor the sender of the message will realize that there was a problem. If you change your email address, it is critical that you specify your new address.

Correct the email address using the Inspector and re-publish your site.

Server Issues

When your site visitor tries to contact you using the form, their message is transmitted to one of Karelia's servers, and then sent to you via email. If there is an error reaching our relay server, then submitting the form from your website will not succeed. In this case, the site visitor would not see a web page indicating that the message was sent.

There may also be a problem with the message that is to be sent; for instance, a missing 'from' address. If this is the case, your site visitor should see some kind of error message indicating that their message could not be sent.

If your site visitor gets to the page that indicates that the message was sent, then our server was able to send the message via email to the address you had specified. At this point, Karelia has no control over what happens to the message; Email can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few days (at absolute worst case) to be delivered.

Receiving Issues

If the message was successfully sent, then the message should be delivered if it was properly addressed and your email system is able to retrieve the message. Some possible reasons that a message may not be delivered:

The incoming e-mail is being marked as spam.

This is the cause of almost all missing messages. The message may be intercepted by your Internet Provider or mail server (such as Gmail); it may be your mail client program (like Apple Mail or Entourage) that hides the message; or it may be an add-on spam filter (such as SpamSieve). Check your junk mail box(es) for miscategorized messages, and adjust your spam filters.

You can minimize the chances of having incoming emails marked as spam by selecting your contact form and checking the "Send from karelia.com" box in the Object Inspector. Details about this feature are explained here.

Your mailbox is full

If you have been away on vacation or otherwise unable to check email, your mailbox may get so full that it is unable to accept new messages. (Usually the sender will be notified of this, but you won't be.)

Strange Characters

If incoming messages contain numeric codes looking like 〹, it is because the Character Encoding you have set for your document is not compatible with the characters that the sender entered in their message. These might be characters in another language, or Emoji. We recommend setting your document's character encoding to UTF-8 or UTF-16.

No Archiving

For privacy reasons, Karelia does not archive any of the messages that are sent via the contact form. If messages were sent to you via the contact form and you did not receive them, we are unable to retrieve those messages for you.

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