Forms not delivered if Yahoo or AOL email addresses used

Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to domain’s\n550-5.7.1 DMARC policy. Please contact administrator of yahoo.com

Does this error look familiar to you? Have you been struggling to figure out why people with Yahoo or AOL email addresses are unable to send messages to you using contact forms on your website even though from their end it looks like it went through just fine?

Have you found that form submissions look like they get through and you can even find them in the admin area of your site but you never receive the email for them?

The problem is that Yahoo and AOL changed some settings in the interest of spam prevention recently… and the problem on your end may not be as obvious as you would like. Most online forms will send a notification to the site owner and those forms will automatically populate the “from” and “reply to” fields in the email address based on what the person submitting the form enters in the form so you can simply click “reply” and it will go to the person that sent it.. The problem with this is that Google/Gmail will block the delivery of any unauthenticated email from Yahoo or AOL because of the DMARC policy (this is not a bad thing, it just causes some issues)

If your forms are setup to automatically put the senders email address as the “from” and/or “reply to” fields in the email you need to change that. Just put in your email address or setup one for this purpose if you prefer, once you do this you will be able to get their submissions again but you will have to remember that when replying to them you can’t simply click “reply” any more, you will have to enter their email address or you will just be replying to yourself :)

Hope this helps some out there that are having issues, I know I scratched my head for a few hours trying to figure out why this wasn’t working.

Also, you MUST HAVE SPF RECORDS for your servers host domain, if you need to check if you have a SPF record or if it is correctly formatted etc go check out the tools on this page http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html