If you use the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin, be sure you don’t set it to send mail “from” the e-mail address of the person filling out the form. If you do, you’ll have trouble due to recent “DMARC” anti-forgery changes some companies (including AOL and Yahoo) have made.
To avoid problems, make sure that Gravity Forms (and other such forms) send mail “from” the Web site domain name the form uses. For instance, if your Web site is at www.example.com, you could send mail from “notifications@example.com”. Here’s a helpful page that explains how to properly set up the Gravity Forms address with DMARC in mind.
By the way, this is just a specific case of the general rule of “don’t send mail from addresses you don’t own”. The simple way to think of it is that you’re not (say) AOL or Yahoo, so your Web site shouldn’t send mail claiming it’s from aol.com or yahoo.com addresses. AOL and Yahoo don’t want other people doing that. Always send mail only from your own domain name.
Update 5:00 PM December 27: AOL has resolved the problem described below. All delayed mail has been delivered, and all services are operating normally.
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Update 6:20 PM October 11: AOL has resolved the problem described below. All delayed mail has been delivered, and all services are operating normally.
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AOL.com had an outage lasting about 3 hours last night (from 11:24 PM Pacific time December 20 to 2:28 AM Pacific time December 21). This problem — a failure of AOL’s DNS servers — affected many people sending e-mail to AOL, and wasn’t related to our service (see this report and this one).
However, if you sent mail to an aol.com address during this time, your messages probably “bounced” with an error saying “Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=aol.com”. If so, you should try sending the message again, and it will work normally. As always, we’ll continue to monitor AOL deliveries closely.
The aol.com mail servers have been having problems for the last 24 hours, according to the AOL blog and the AOL Twitter feed.
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