Your website needs its own return address
Every email your website sends, including contact form notifications, order receipts, and password resets, carries a from address, the digital equivalent of the return address on an envelope. On sites we host, that address belongs to your own domain, something like website@yourdomain.com. That is deliberate, and it matters more than it might seem.
Why not just use my Gmail or AOL address?
It feels natural to want the website to send as the address you actually read, but here is the problem: Gmail publishes public rules stating that only Google's own servers are allowed to send mail ending in gmail.com. Your website runs on our servers, not Google's. So a message from your website claiming to be from your Gmail address looks, to every receiving mail system, exactly like a forgery, because technically it is one, even though your intentions are honest. The same applies to AOL, Yahoo, Outlook.com, and every other personal email provider. These messages are increasingly rejected outright or sent straight to spam.
When the website sends as an address at your own domain instead, it can prove its identity. Your domain's records, which we configure, list our servers as authorized senders and stamp each message with a verifiable signature. The mail passes the checks and gets delivered.
So how do I reply to customers? That is what reply-to is for
Email has two separate address fields that often get confused:
- From is who sent the message. For website mail, this should always be your domain's address, because that is the sender that can be verified.
- Reply-to is where a reply should go. This can be anything: the customer who filled out your form, or your personal inbox.
This gives you the best of both worlds. When a visitor submits your contact form, the notification arrives from your website's own address, so it actually gets delivered, but the moment you hit reply, your response goes straight to the visitor. You never have to copy and paste their email address, and you never send as someone you are not.
One habit worth keeping
If you ever add a new form, newsletter tool, or plugin that sends email, set its from address to your own domain and put any other destination in reply-to. If a tool only offers one address field, use your domain address there.
Not sure what address your website is sending from, or want it changed? Open a support ticket and we will check and adjust it for you.
