I have had a few cases where mysteriously the website is suddenly not sending emails out allegedly. Further investigation shows it is sending emails out, but the recipient is not receiving them, so what is going on?
Local IT at work?
Inevitably it is because a local IT company has installed Office 365 for you and you are now running over Microsoft Outlook servers. Your local IT person who works with you in your office, had been granted access to the hosting settings to redirect email to the new servers. However the they have omitted to test something.
Always check
It is quite common that people place their absolute confidence in their local IT guy, he is after all an expert in his field. Some however do not look at the bigger picture, and this is where the problem occurs.
Email filtering and SPF
Outlook as with many other services, including the one built into your hosting package uses something called SPF (Server Policy Framework). What SPF does is validates the sending source of incoming emails to make sure the legitimate listed server was the one that sent the email.
Your website may be a sending source
Depending on how your website is set up, the hosting framework is a legitimate source of emails. The website can send emails from contact forms, and also maintenance messages, and password setup and recovery.
When I set up your hosting I provide some information into the SPF DNS field which permits the website to be a legitimate sending source for your domain name. What your local IT guy has done is overwritten it with the information he has to add into the SPF settings. What he should do is add it in, and not overwrite the content which I left there. If they do that it will always work.
If your IT guy has been in……
Before he leaves, go to your website, and fill in the contact us form. You should see the message come in. If it does not come in, then ask your IT guy to check the settings he has added in.
If you are still stuck, please get in contact with me and I will check. But this is often the reason why some of the system stops working. It is generally because your IT guy has been in.