If you wrote me a message using my contact form and never received a personal reply, please don’t be mad. Most unfortunately, I did not get your message. Yes, I know you got an auto-response and form reply telling you your message was “successfully sent”, but I didn’t actually get your email. I just discovered this breakdown in mail delivery, and after hours of troubleshooting, I managed to get it working again. It wasn’t any errors I made in the settings, but apparently what might be an extremely finicky server.

It has been years since I took any programming classes, yet I still find myself having to debug stuff. This is why I never became a CS major.

I am using the Fast Secure Contact Form plugin in WordPress. The failure is unlikely to have been the fault of the plugin, or erroneous settings. When I realized I wasn’t getting any email through the form, I tried all the suggested solutions, including entering a “Custom Email From”. Nothing worked. Finally, just when I felt like giving up, I found out I could receive messages if I set the “Email To” address as an email outside of my domain. This means I can’t send site messages from example1@gwenphua.com to example2@gwenphua.com, but example1@gwenphua.com to example3@gmail.com works. Strange? You bet!

All my email is running off gmail, and nothing is broken there. The most likely explanation I can think of is that my hosting server is cranky and finicky.

Well, now that I’ve found the workaround, anyone who tried sending me any messages should write me again. I’m very sorry for the hiccup in my contact form. All valid messages sent via the form will get to me from now on … and hopefully there won’t be another spontaneous breakdown in the sometimes bumpy digital highway.