Forms stack

41

One thing I learned from our networking group was that it is imperative that the email address used to push the forms actually exists. I’ve never seen this mentioned in any of the documentation I’ve read, including MachForm’s. They state that it’s important that the domains match, but (to the best of my knowledge), they don’t explicitly state that the email address itself must exist. From a technical standpoint, it doesn’t have to if one is using PHP mail, and the provider isn’t authenticating…as long as the domain matches, the email will still be sent.

BUT - Microsoft Exchange / Outlook 365 (and, I presume others) absolutely ping the sender’s system before delivering the piece of email to determine if the email account actually exists. If it does not, then the message goes into the spam folder.

I found out the hard way when dozens of complaints starting rolling in quite a while back. I couldn’t figure it out - nothing on my end had changed. The email address I was using (something like forms@ourdomain.com) was suddenly being blocked by our firewall, so our schedulers were not receiving the requests (our firewall should not have been blocking anything originating from ourdomain.com). We figured it out when networking realized that the email address I was using didn’t exist - and Microsoft was scoring the in-bound emails as spam; which caused our firewall to detain them. They created the mailbox and voila ~ all of the emails began flowing into the scheduler’s mailboxes again.

42

Gary is correct. Machforms hosted and Stacks solutions will send mail the same way, either via PHPmail or your own SMTP override. PHPmail is unreliable.

The most reliable way is via a mail relay service such as Mailgun or SendGrid. Doing it this way allows you to track the emails, break free of hourly email volume limits, and avoid blacklisting. HOWEVER, some web hosts won’t allow this, forcing you to use their own mail host. I had this experience with a certain heavily endorsed web host, whose mail servers had a tendency to get blacklisted so it was no more reliable than PHPmail.

43

It’s been a long time happening, but today I have a MacForms self-hosted account!!!

Thanks to @dave and others for their recommendations. 1LD’s SuperForms 2 are brilliant, but php 8 has broken something and one client in particular is losing the odd email and getting issues.

There is a small supplementary… is there any way to add a touch of padding to form fields in MachForms? Headers needed to be slightly bigger for mobile and it has cropped some borders. I know there is an option to add css, not quite sure how it works in this case though.
I have tried “div { padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 20px; }” in the field properties, with no sucess.

I am using Scribe to add the form script to the site - I can centre the form which Source Coder does not allow, are there better options?

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Thanks 😊

44

Hey Nick,
Sorry I didn’t reply sooner; I’ve been on the road for the past few days. Adding the padding should be a pretty easy task. Please try these steps and let me know how you fare. I’ve found that in some cases, I need to duplicate a theme when modifying CSS.

  • Click the Theme button
  • Click the icon with three lines to create a new theme
  • Click Advanced CSS Code
  • Add:
#main_body .form_description h2, 
#main_body .form_success h2 {
    padding-left: 10px;
    padding-right: 10px;
}
  • Click I’m Done Editing
  • Click Save Theme
  • Give it a name
  • Save Changes

(My suggestion is to go back and select the new theme “Delete Me” and change the other aspects (Logo) and colors since you probably won’t want “MachForm” to show as the logo.)

  • Click on Forms
  • Select “Theme” from the navbar under the name of the form you want to modify
  • Select the name of the theme you just created
  • Save Changes
  • Click view - and proof
    Hopefully the Headers (H2) are moved 10 pixels to the left

Cheers - Dave

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45

Hi Dave,
That is kind, thank you!
Ironically, Yuniar came back and apologised for there being a slight bug in the CSS code. Either way, it is fixed beautifully on mobile. Now if I can only get the form to centre in Scribe or any other code stack, I’ll be home and dry!
Overall, your recommendation was spot on. Machform is easy to setup and the client is delighted. Loving the fact that saved form data is easy to access too, in case of mail issues.

2 Likes
46

Final follow up Dave - so happy with Yuniar’s Machform that I am signing up for the ‘Pro’ plan and moving all website forms I run across to the platform.

Thanks again for your suggestion!

1 Like
47

Hey, @Nick!
It’s fantastic to hear that MachForm has hit the mark for you! Yuniar has truly created a powerful tool that enhances our web development capabilities, especially when integrated into diverse projects like those we tackle with RapidWeaver.

2 Likes