Why is Muse's contact form not sending emails?

[Lkj]

I built a small website which has Muse's simple contact form. I think I did everything right but the form is not sending emails. (I don't get any errors, just a success message when I hit submit)

I have a hosting plan on hostinger.com and have discussed this with their tech support. They assured me it's all good on their side and that the contact form script must be the issue. The tech guy checked and said there were no emails sent on their server from my address. I tried to google this and found many possible solutions which did not work for me.

The email address in the form is on the same domain (example www.site.com - info@site.com) and PHP mail function is enabled on my hosting plan.

Are there any possible fixes for this? The contact form is such a basic (and crucial) function and I can't believe it won't work just by default!

[Nancy OShea]

Did you check your spam folder?

Did you try sending form data to another email address?

[Lkj]

Hi Nancy OShea, thanks for the suggestions. Checking the spam folder was the first thing I tried.

And I just modified the PHP script to change the recipient address to my Gmail address and I immediately got the message (although in the spam folder) That means the issue must be on the hostinger.com server, right? If so, I'm not sure how to convince them to help me, I spoke to three tech support guys already and they all said it's a web development issue and that they cannot help me.

EDIT: what I mentioned above worked ONLY ONCE. Every other time I tried to send a message through the contact form I did not receive anything anymore. Tech support on hostinger.com says their email service is working fine and that there is an issue with my PHP script. This is getting very frustrating for me

[Nancy OShea]

OK.   So the form processing script does indeed work.  But mail sent from your domain server is being rejected or flagged as spam which is a more complex issue. 

Please refer to the article below and tell your tech support people to give you some help with DKIM, SPF and DMARC policy.  

How to Keep your Email Out of the Spam Folder - cPanel Knowledge Base - cPanel Documentation

[Lkj]

Here's some further info on this issue. After some testing, it was obvious that contact form indeed does work, but if you type in Gmail address it does not get the message delivered to you. So you can literally type in some gibberish address like fsgff@fefdss.com and the form even then will get you the email. The only time the email does not get through is when Gmail address is typed in.

I managed to solve this temporarily with the tech support and the only thing that worked is to disable spam and antivirus filters for that email account. Not very happy with this solution, but it is the only thing that they could do, other than reprogramming the contact script (which is not something I can really do).

The tech guy said that it is due to bad programming of the contact form script. I know Muse is EOL, but this widget was used back when Muse was in development and I can't believe a simple thing like contact form should cause such issues!

Is there anybody out there with similar issues? Maybe someone can recommend a different contact form widget for Muse?

[Nancy OShea · Accepted solution]

You could use a 3rd party form service like wufoo.com and embed their code in your Muse page.  Form processing occurs on their servers, not yours.