Why do I get a “Delivery Status Notification (Delay)” email message?

We recently saw that a customer received the following email message in their junk folder.

Although we are not actually sure why the customer got this message, it is an alert that the email system is trying to deliver the message and it got delayed and it will try again.  It is only a warning.

Here is a short, interesting article focused on this question, which gives a little background about email systems and message delivery:

Why Am I Getting a “Delivery Status Notification (Delay)” on an Email I Sent?

If you see this problem and it persists, then at that point, it worth digging deeper to see what it is about the particular email that may cause it to be delayed (and maybe eventually fail being delivered).

 

 

Email from GoDaddy Secureserver going to Spam in Gmail

Last week we faced an interesting problem from a customer.

For this customer, we developed a website that included a ‘Contact Form’ on their Contact page.  Their contact form is designed to take input from a visitor of the website and then when they press the ‘Submit’ button, an email is generated and sent to the customer’s Gmail.

This website is hosted by GoDaddy (lives in GoDaddy’s Webspace).

For contact forms like this, the form uses .php code to formulate the email (from the text from the contact form) and send the email out through GoDaddy’s emails server ‘secureserver.net’.

The (fixed) code for the contact form specifies where to send this email.  For example a customer may want email coming to their business email hosted by Gmail.  This was the case for this customer of ours.  They wanted all of these emails sent to their business Gmail account.

The form also has a hard coded Subject line, which says something like…

“Email from Your Business Name website”

So the receiver of this email will see this as the subject in the email delivered from this contact form.

In the issue we saw, it turns out that Gmail considers any email sent from the GoDaddy email server (secureserver.net) as Spam and it goes into the Spam folder.  This was annoying for the customer and I don’t blame them.

We researched and found that other people have seen this issue, too, and finding a fix can be frustrating.

We found that one good and reliable way to solve this issue is to install an email filter in your Gmail that identifies these incoming emails and tells GMail that these are not Spam.

In our case the one piece of information that is constant for all incoming emails from the contact form is the Subject line.  This is what we used to have Gmail identify these incoming email messages.

Here is how to install a Gmail filter so that your email does not get sent to the Spam folder.

We will use our issue as the working example and give you step by step what we did.

So, this is how we solved the issue of email messages, generated by our contact form on our web page, hosted on GoDaddy being considered by Gmail as Spam.

First, we made sure we sent a test email message from our contact form and we see it goes to the Spam folder in our Gmail email.

Steps to fix this:

1. We logged into our Gmail (on-line, using our browser)

2. We clicked on our ‘Spam’ folder to show the messages marked as Spam (We made sure that we had a Spam email that had come in from our Contact Form).

3. We selected one of these messages by checking it’s check box.

4. On the Gmail tool bar above this list of emails, we clicked on ‘More’ to see the More options menu (which is a drop down menu)

5. We clicked on ‘Filter messages like these’ in this drop down menu

6. Now this shows you a filter form to fill in (we see that the From field is already filled in, but in our case we want the From field to be blank.  See the next step)

7. In the filter form, remove any text from the ‘From’ box (this box must be blank).  This is a very important step for this to work.  If you miss this, it will not work.

8. In the ‘Subject’ text box we put the following text;

Email from Your Webbits website

This is because, in our specific case, this subject line will be the same text from all emails coming in from the Contact form (this is our constant piece of information that we can depend on for Gmail to find these messages).

Note:  This is what our filter form looked like.  Note, the only field we needed was the Subject field.

GmailFilterFormExample

9. We then, pressed the ‘Create filter with this search’ button

10. We then check the checkbox ‘Never send it to Spam’ because we want all of these incoming email messages to not be considered as Spam

11. Then we pressed ‘Create filter’ button to complete this filter creation process and we are done creating our Gmail email filter

In order to prove that this is now working properly, we sent a new test message from our contact form and sure enough, the incoming message in our Gmail account went to our inbox and not our Spam folder.

Issue solved for all of these messages!

So to summarize:  We solved this issue by creating a Gmail filter for incoming emails which, in our case, checked ONLY the Subject line of the incoming email and it creates a rule to say, these emails are not Spam.  All new incoming email messages sent by the contact form will now never be considered Spam.

We hope this helps people resolve similar issues.

 

 

 

Why Don’t I Have A Search Box On My Facebook Business Page?

This week, we received a question from a customer about why they did not have a Search Bar or Like button on their Facebook Business Page.

This was extremely puzzling.  We had not run into this issue before.

When we viewed this business page as a visitor, we indeed saw a Like button.  Again, puzzling.

The customer gave us access to their Facebook Business page to view it as they do, and sure enough, no blue bar (search bar) at the top of the page with the search box in it and no Like button.  Very, very strange.

We started to search for answers.  It took a little time to find a solution, but we saw that lots of other people have run into this also.

The Solution:

Are you ready…

It turns out that this customer converted their personal page to a business page, rather than creating a business page from their personal Facebook page and in this case, no Admin was assigned to the page.  This is the issue!

So, if you do not have an Admin for your business page, you will not have all the features for the business page, like the Search Bar and the Like button.

In this case, we had to create a personal Facebook account for the customer.  The customer then had to search for the Business page and ‘Like’ it and then we had to log into the Business page and assign the customer as an Admin of the page.  Problem solved!

Here are the instructions for setting a ‘Page Role’ (in this case the Admin role) for your Business page.

  1.  From your Business Page, select ‘Settings’ on the white toolbar (at the top below the blue bar).
  2. Then, in the Settings box, select ‘Page Roles’
  3. In Page Roles, there is a text box where you can enter the email address of the person your want to assign a page role to.  In this case, again, we selected Admin.  There is a drop down selection where you can select the page role.
  4. With this done, press ‘Save’ button to keep your change.

Note:  The person you selected must have a Facebook account and they must have already ‘Liked’ your business page.  If they have met these conditions, you can assign them a page role.  Then the Facebook Business page will have all the expected features for the Admin.

Our suggestion would be, if you want to create a Facebook Business page, create it from your Facebook personal page, that way you will not run into this issue.

Hope this was helpful.

Along with providing Low Cost, Custom Designed, Professional Websites, YouWebbits Software can also help with your computer and social media issues and questions.  Give us a try.  You can call, email or contact through our website contact page.

www.yourwebbits.com

 

 

 

Welcome to Your Webbits Software

Welcome to Your Webbits Software

Your Webbits Software is a website building business.  But, we are so much more than that.  Our goal here is to level the playing field.  We want to give the same opportunities to the small business owner that the large companies have.  We try to keep the prices honest and low so that the small business owner has a chance to compete.

For more information, please check out our website. www.yourwebbits.com