Ever wondered how your website delivers the enquiries to you? What happen to the enquiries if for some reason email problems occured? Let’s categorize emails triggered from a website to two types of emails.

1. Email reminder (requires no action taken by reader, usually notification)
We suggest that the From field should looks something like noreply@xxx.com. Recipient should not attempt to reply to this reminder. Anyway, just to be sure you can still forward any reply sent to noreply@xxx.com to another email account (eg, tech@abc.com) and make sure you miss no email.

2. Email expecting some action (recipient will most likely hit the Reply button to reply)
The From field should come from an email which you wish to receive the email.

Your website should use some class file to connect to external SMTP or outgoing mail server in order to deliver the email. Avoid using built-in SMTP server such as Sendmail. Most of the time, it is not configured to be full-proof and it might mark your emails SPAM emails. It is also not a good idea to share web and email servers together.

You may want to take a look at our related posts

• Reply All
• Stop Using Read Receipt!
• Setting up Outlook & Outlook Express
• Signs of busy mail server
• TM’s SMTP Nightmare!