Welcome to the latest episode of the engaging marketeer podcast. Today, I want to talk about a very specific issue which a lot of business owners face and that most web designers don’t have a clue how to fix. This is because they don’t really understand the relationship between emails and websites, and how websites actually process the emails.
I think it’s important first of all to tell a little story, a little business parable that you probably have heard, so please don’t stop me if you’ve heard it it’s the kind of thing that gets told a lot on social media. It’s origin is probably very old and probably very, very untrue, but it does have an important meaning.
So, there’s a ship in a dock, and the owners of the ship are panicking because the ship has a leak and the water’s coming into the ship and the ship is starting to sink. They’ve been looking around the bowels of the ship, they’ve been in the stern, and they can’t find where the water’s coming in. They don’t know how to stop the leak and they’re risking losing a multi-multi-million pound ship that’s going to sink into the middle of the harbour. So they bring in an expert a ship engineer, and the ship engineer comes in, he’s got his tool belt on him and he walks around the insides of the ship. He goes from the bow, he goes to the stern, he has a look around all the different panels on the side of the ship. Then, suddenly, he stops and he pulls out a nail, and he puts the nail up to the side of the ship and he hammers the nail into the ship and stops the leak. He has saved the ship, so the owners of the ship are obviously delighted by this. The ship engineer hands them a bill for thirty thousand pounds, and they’re furious. They’re like ‘What the hell is this? Why are you giving me a bill for 30 000 pounds? All you did was hammer a nail into the side, anyone could have done that!’ The shipping engineer explains to them that yes, anyone could have hammered a nail into the side of the ship and the nail itself is probably only worth about 20 pence.
You’re not paying for the nail, you’re not paying for a man to hammer the nail in. You’re paying for the years and years of training and experience and knowledge to know where to hammer the nail. That’s a parable that goes around social media quite a lot about how you should be charging your services for what they’re worth for the training and the experience and the knowledge that you’ve got, not for what somebody thinks your time is worth. Almost an identical thing happened to me earlier this week, except there wasn’t a ship involved and there wasn’t a nail involved, and there wasn’t any kind of manual labour because I don’t do that, and there wasn’t the risk of anything sinking, so it was quite different actually.
I was speaking to the owner of a pretty well-known business, and they’ve got a website that they’ve had for many years, and it’s looked after by a particular guy who designed and built the website. But he doesn’t really look after it because most web designers don’t do that when you get a website designed by somebody, they design the website and then the website is hosted on a particular server with a hosting company. And ever since this website was moved to this new hosting company, they have not received a single email through it. They haven’t received a single email through the website since it’s moved and they don’t know why. They don’t know what to do, because the web designer doesn’t want to know and the hosting company says there’s nothing wrong. As soon as they started talking about it, I knew exactly what the problem was. I said I bet the the email address that the contact form is sending to is an email address at your domain name for the website, it doesn’t go to a Hotmail or a Gmail or something else, it goes to the domain name for the website, doesn’t it? Yes, they said. I said I’m also willing to bet that the email for your website isn’t handled by the hosting company. Yes.
I thought as much. I know exactly what the problem is instantly. It’s because when the web designer has moved the website across to this new hosting environment – I should specify that this website is WordPress – he hasn’t set up the email routing on the cPanel properly. Because most web designers do not understand cPanel, they just design websites. They make pretty looking websites, they’re good at design, they’re good at creative, but the vast majority of them haven’t got a clue about a server setup. Why would they? It’s a different skill.
If anybody out there is listening to this now and thinking ‘I’ve got a website like this and I’ve not had any email come through the contact form and I’ve tested it and it doesn’t work’, this is what you do. Log into the cPanel for your website, log in there or get your web designer or your server host to do it for you, then click on the link for email routing – that’s the function within cPanel that tells the server what to do with email if an email is sent in the server where does it go. You’ve got three options in there, I think it’s local, remote or automatic. Now, local is what this company had and what most web designers tend to leave it on because they don’t know to change it. Local is telling the website server any email sent to this domain name, any email sent through here through a contact form through this website, anything processed by a script on this website, it’s trying to deliver it locally. However, they’re not on that, they’re on Office 365, which means the email sent locally by the website needs to leave the server, but it’s not being allowed to do so. What they need to do is switch it to remote, which is saying don’t try and deliver that email locally, let it out into the internet so that it can go where it needs to go and then Microsoft Office 365 can pick it up and it’ll land in their inbox.
Realistically, if they wanted me to do it for them, let’s say I had the login username and password, it probably would have taken me 10 to 15 seconds tops 30 seconds if I was being slow. That is me effectively hammering the nail into the side of the ship and stopping their leak. But I didn’t charge them 30,000 pounds for that, I didn’t charge them anything for that, because it’s something that I just offered them as knowledge. I hope that if you’re listening to this now and you have a similar problem, I hope you know there is another way you can fix this.
I first encountered this issue back in 2003, when I was hand coding a contact form. Back in 2003, however, this kind of information wasn’t available on podcasts and it certainly wasn’t available on the internet, because nobody had these problems, nobody was doing this. But that was 2003 I had this problem, and every time I hear this from a client now, I know instantly it’s your email routing. It’s that simple.
I hope this has been useful for you. If it hasn’t been useful for you, then apologies for that. If you hear anybody saying that they’re having a problem such as this, that they’ve got a website and the contact form isn’t working the emails aren’t being received when someone’s made a change or the hosting’s changed, then please refer them to this podcast because it’s a very very simple fix. By referring them to this podcast, they can fix that for themselves. So thank you very much for listening, I would greatly appreciate if you could give me a five star review, or just give me some comments some feedback. Please subscribed on YouTube, that would be absolutely appreciated. Thank you very much and I will catch you on the next podcast.