I think the time is fast approaching when Blocs will have to feature sending form data via SMTP. At the moment, data is sent via PHP using the PHP mail function. Unfortunately, many EU-based hosting companies (and some in Asia) are now depreciating PHP sendmail. Basically, they are turning off this facility, and although you can usually turn it back on again via your host’s cPanel, your host can suspend your account if they discover you’ve switched it back on again. These same companies are also insisting that forms contain captchas - again, as a condition of service. As a consequence, I cannot use blocs standard form facility on a number of sites. Instead, I’ve opted to use custom form scripts that contain both captchas, and the ability to send via SMTP. Its really annoying - particularly if you don’t want to use third-party hosted solutions.
On some of my client sites, I’ve had to resort to a bit of trickery to overcome the problem. Basically, I’ve set up a domain in the US that hosts a form processing script as well as generate forms for use in client websites. These forms can then be embedded into sites anywhere in the world. When forms are submitted, they are processed in the US and the results forwarded to the client’s designated email address, thereby bypassing the restrictions imposed by EU web hosts. It’s all a bit drastic, but has to be done. Hopefully @Norm could find a little time to address this potentially escalating problem by adding an SMTP option for form processing, as well as adding a simple captcha device instead of being forced into using Google’s reCAPTCHA.
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Good point. As I’m working with a hosting company myself, we do still offer PHP mail, but it is a given fact that authenticated mails (over SMTP) do get a better spam rating than the ones sent via PHP mail. You can test this fairly easily using for example mail-tester.com and sending the same mail using both methods.
So whenever a customer wants to improve deliverability, we’ll always advise a switch to sending authenticated (via SMTP), together with making sure things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up correctly. In this light, support for SMTP (could be implemented by @Norm by adding a PHP-file with the script that handles the SMTP-connection and sending) would be a great feature request looking towards the near future.
I recently purchased Easy forms for that. Still need to find time to figure out how all things work, but it looks very impressive.
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To date the mail forms have worked perfectly for me, however they could also use fields for CC and BCC addresses with simple comma separation for multiple addresses. It’s not a problem until you have a client with two or more people that each insist on receiving emails, yet don’t want to share an address.
I haven’t heard any indication from my web host in the UK that they plan to drop PHP mail function but I definitely wouldn’t want to be caught out with lots of Blocs sites if this happened. Nearly all my clients are on my reseller server and paying for hosting, so they will just expect this to work.
@hendon52 For EU clients I would have thought you are on tricky ground processing mail via another server in the US considering GDPR.
That’s a handy site there @brechtryckaert, thanks for sharing
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@Flashman GDPR is really only concerned with privacy issues. As long as your form doesn’t contain any tracking options or the website owner has a clear privacy and cookie policy that visitors can agree or disagree, there isn’t a problem. What EU hosting providers are attempting to do is to not allow their servers to become potential spam gateways, therefore, they are leaning towards the SMTP route. The policy itself is just fine, and probably sensible, but it’s difficult to implement without some third-party script which usually comes with a price tag. This is why I think it’s important for Blocs to have such an option as part of a complete web development solution. It can clearly be done. This is a screenshot from a competing app that does have this option:
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