Why your site shouldn’t email itself

Your site sends email from an address you choose, and it also sends you notifications when things happen: a shop order, a booking, a form filled in. If both are set to the same address, your site ends up emailing itself. Some mail providers treat that as suspicious, and the message is filtered or dropped without warning. It does not happen every time, which is exactly what makes it hard to spot.

Setting it up properly

1. Choose one address for your site to send from. Something general like info@ or hello@ at your own domain works well, because it is the address your congregation will see and reply to. See changing the address your site’s emails come from.
2. Choose a different address to receive notifications. Something like web@ or admin@ at the same domain is ideal.
3. Set your notifications to go to the receiving address rather than the sending one. Notification addresses are set in a few places depending on what triggers them, so check anywhere you have asked to be told about something.
4. In your own email system, forward the receiving address into the mailbox your team already watches. Nobody then has an extra inbox to remember.
5. Test it. Place a small order, submit a form, or do whatever the notification is for, and confirm it lands.

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Good to know

• This usually bites at go-live rather than before it. While you are still on a hubb.church address the mail comes from us, so nothing loops. The moment you switch to your own domain, sending and receiving can become the same address.
• If notifications stop arriving after go-live and nothing else has changed, this is the first thing to check.
• Check the spam folder before concluding a message never arrived, and add your sending address to your safe senders list.
• Sending from your own domain also needs the right SPF record in place, otherwise providers like Gmail may reject your mail entirely. See SPF records and sending emails from your own domain address.
• Your team can still work from one mailbox. This is about which address the system uses, not about where your staff read their email.