DNS

It's not possible to block every spam submission to your website's forms, but there are a few options to help reduce it.

• Google reCAPTCHA
  • This is the standard spam prevention solution that TinyFrog recommends for all websites to help protect your website forms from spam submissions.
  • Google's reCAPTCHA system helps to block most spam submissions from automated bots.
  • Some sophisticated bots, and spam submitted manually by humans, may still get past the reCAPTCHA protection system.
• Akismet
  • TinyFrog recommends Akismet when Google's reCAPTCHA system is failing to reduce spam submissions to an acceptable level.
  • Akismet works by checking form submissions against their database of known spam submissions and blocking submissions when it detects spam.
  • This service requires a monthly subscription for commercial websites.

There are several reasons that emails from form submissions on your website may not be making it to your inbox or may be going to spam. Below are our general troubleshooting steps to diagnose and fix email issues:

1. Use a Domain-Matching "From" Address

Start by verifying that your website's outgoing emails are sent using a "from" address that matches your website's domain name. For example, if your site is example.com, your emails should come from an address like info@example.com or no-reply@example.com, and not example@gmail.com or another unrelated address.

Mismatched domains can raise red flags with spam filters and lead to delivery failures or having the emails sent to spam.

2. Whitelist the Sending Address

If your site sends emails to a specific group of recipients regularly (e.g., staff, subscribers, or clients), ask them to whitelist your sending address or domain. This improves deliverability by telling their email systems that messages from your domain are expected and safe.

For some email services, you may need to coordinate with your IT team to add the domain or email address to the allowlist on corporate mail servers or spam filters.

3. Set Up Your SPF and DMARC Records

One of the most critical steps is ensuring your domain's Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is properly configured. SPF helps mail servers verify that your website or its email delivery service (like Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc.) is authorized to send email on behalf of your domain.

TinyFrog hosts your website on WPEngine and WP Engine servers use the email relay service MailChannels to deliver emails sent from WordPress. As such, we highly recommend allowlisting email sent through MailChannels with an SPF record configured at your DNS host.

An SPF record is set as a TXT record similarly to DMARC, like so:

v=spf1 include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all

If you already have an SPF record, simply add the MailChannels relay to the existing record rather than adding a separate record. For example: v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net include:mailgun.org include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all

This SPF record should be set at your DNS host, where DNS is managed for the sending domain.

Your IT team may have to assist with setting up your DMARC record, WPEngine provides additional details for this record here.

4. Send email through an email Account or relay service if the above steps do not work

If the above steps do not resolve your email delivery issues then you may need to connect your website to an email account and have emails sent through that service or use a 3rd party email relay service such as Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

You can read more about these options in our how-to guide here.

It is important to understand how emails from your website are delivered, emails from your website can be sent in one of three ways:

1. Sending email via the hosting platform's email service (https://www.mailchannels.com/)
   • This is the method used by default on WordPress websites
   • This requires an SPF record to whitelist email from the website server / service that WPEngine uses to route email
   • This may also require you to whitelist the "from" address that emails are sent from
     • This may require your email service support team to assist with
2. Sending email through an external email account
   • This requires the website to connect to an existing email account through your email service provider in one of two ways
     • Some email providers allow a website to connect using the email address and email account password
     • Some email providers require you to connect via their API which may require generating API keys within your email account service
   • Clients are responsible for creating any needed email account and for generating any needed API keys to connect the website to their email services.
3. Sending email through a 3rd party email delivery service such as SendGrid (https://sendgrid.com/en-us), SMTP (https://www.smtp.com/), MailGun (https://www.mailgun.com/), etc.
   • These services are typically only needed when sending large amount of emails to customers from the website
   • Clients are responsible for creating accounts and paying for any 3rd party email delivery services.

To point the domain to our server you’ll need to make a few adjustments:

• Make sure that your www record is a CNAME record pointing to wp.wpenginepowered.com (If your www record is an A Record you can delete it and replace it with the requested CNAME record).
• You will need to edit / remove your existing A Record(s) for just the base domain name and replace it with two A Records with one for each of the following IP addresses:
  • 141.193.213.10
  • 141.193.213.11

Your updated DNS records and CNAME record should look similar to the following screenshots.

Only have these 2 IPs for the "A" records. Make sure there are no AAAA records in place for root domain.

Please let us know as soon as these changes have been made.

We recommend that you take a screenshot before making changes just in case any records need to be restored. Once you’ve made the requested changes you can send us a screenshot of the final changes for Tinyfrog to review and verify.

We will watch the domain propagation after the changes have been made. The propagation typically takes 10 to 15 minutes, but can sometimes take longer. We ask that no one on your team attempt to make any changes to the website until the DNS propagation is complete.