Website Enquiries All Arriving With the Same Subject Line

One long conversation

The office manager at a trades business notices that website enquiries seem to have stopped. They have not: each is titled New message from website, and the email program has gathered them into one conversation.

New enquiries land inside that conversation, under weeks of older ones, and the whole thing shows as read once anyone opens it. A request sent on Tuesday turns up on Friday, by accident.

Then someone replies to an enquiry, and the answer goes to the website's own address instead of the customer. The customer, hearing nothing, calls someone else.

How a form builds its message

A contact form does not email anything by itself. When a visitor presses Send, a script on the web server takes the fields and assembles an ordinary email from them.

The script fills in each part from its settings: who the message goes to, who it is from, where replies go, the subject, and a body holding the visitor's answers.

Whoever set up the form chose those settings, often once, years ago. A fixed subject and the website's own address in the From line are common defaults nobody revisited.

The lines that matter

A few parts of the message decide how it behaves in the office inbox:

• The subject, which email programs use to group messages into conversations.
• The From line, which says which address sent the message.
• The Reply-To line, which tells the email program where replies go.
• The To line, which decides whose inbox it lands in.
• The body, which should set out the visitor's answers one field per line.

The subject and the Reply-To line cause most of the trouble, and both are settings in the form's script.

Why identical subjects become one thread

Email programs group messages into conversations so a back-and-forth reads as one thread. Gmail and Outlook both do this, largely by matching subject lines.

When every enquiry has the same subject and comes from the same address, the program reasonably treats them as one long exchange. Each new enquiry joins it instead of standing on its own.

A subject that carries something particular to each enquiry, such as the customer's name and the service requested, gives every message a conversation of its own.

Why Reply goes to the website

Pressing Reply answers the address in the Reply-To line if there is one, and otherwise the address in the From line.

A form that sends from the website's own address and sets no Reply-To sends every answer back to the website, to a mailbox nobody reads or none at all.

The customer's address sits in the body of the message, but email programs do not look there. Unless someone copies it across by hand, the reply never reaches them.

Why the customer's address does not belong in From

Some forms put the customer's address in From so that Reply works. But receiving servers increasingly check whether the sending server may send for the domain in the From line.

A web server is not entitled to send for a customer's email provider, so those messages are more likely to land in junk or be refused. The customer's address belongs in Reply-To.

The From line should hold a fixed address on your own domain that your web server is permitted to send for, such as a forms address set up for the purpose.

A worked example

A grease trap pumping service with three vacuum trucks serves restaurants, cafeterias and food plants across a region. Its website has a service request form asking for the business, address, trap size and preferred date.

Every request arrived titled New message from website, from the website's own address. The office's email program stacked them into one thread, and replies went to a server mailbox nobody read.

Restaurant managers who heard nothing phoned, some of them annoyed, and some had already booked another company. The office had been answering promptly; the answers had simply gone nowhere.

The form now builds its subject from the request itself: Service request, then the restaurant's name and city. The From line is a forms address on the company's domain, and Reply-To is the manager's own address.

The form also sends the manager a short confirmation with the office phone number. Each request now starts its own conversation, and Reply goes straight to the person who asked.

Writing a useful subject

Put the most useful facts first, because subjects are cut short in narrow windows and on phones: the kind of request, then the customer's name or business, then the town.

Keep a fixed word at the start, such as Website enquiry, so the office can still filter or search for all of them together.

Leave the visitor's message out of the subject. Long subjects are cut off anyway, and whatever a spammer types into the form would land in the office's subject lines.

Testing the result

Send three enquiries through the website with different names and addresses you control, one of them from a phone. Check that each arrives as a separate conversation with a clear subject.

Press Reply on each and look at where the reply is addressed before sending it. Then confirm the reply arrived, and check the junk folder for the confirmation message.

Run the same test whenever the website, the hosting or the office email changes, since each can quietly alter how the form's messages are built or delivered.

The counter-case

An office that receives one enquiry a week, read by a single person who copies each address into a new message out of habit, may never notice either problem.

That habit is fragile, though. A busy day or a new staff member, and an enquiry goes unanswered without anyone knowing.

Fixing the form's settings takes less time than one lost job, and it is a change whoever maintains the website should make and test with the office.

Setting the subject, From and Reply-To

1. Open the last ten enquiries in the office inbox.
2. Note the subject each one arrived with.
3. Press Reply and see where it is addressed.
4. Put request details in the subject line.
5. Send from a fixed address on your own domain.
6. Set Reply-To to the customer's address.
7. Test from a phone and a computer after every change.

Step six fixes the costly half of the problem. Grouped messages waste time, but replies sent to the website's own address leave customers believing nobody answered.

The contact form also belongs among the Monday morning checks after a server move, set out in when the host moves your account to a new server.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.