Your contact form says 'thank you' but sends nothing. Here is how to tell.

Why a thank-you page proves nothing

When someone fills in your contact form and presses send, two separate things have to happen. The page has to accept the message, and the server has to hand that message to a mail system that delivers it.

The thank-you page only tells you the first one worked. In most broken forms, the second step fails silently. There is no error, because nothing crashed — the site simply handed the message to something that threw it away.

The five-minute test

1. Open your website on your phone, using mobile data rather than your office wifi.
2. Fill in the contact form with a made-up name and a real message like "test 3pm Tuesday".
3. Send it, then start a timer.
4. Check the inbox that should receive it. Wait ten minutes.
5. Check the spam folder too, and any filters or rules you have set up.

If nothing arrives within ten minutes, your form is not delivering. Do this once a month, or have it done automatically every hour.

The three usual causes

1. The site sends from an address it is not allowed to use

This is the most common cause by far. Your form sends mail claiming to be from you@yourdomain.com, but the server sending it has no permission to send as your domain. Modern mail systems check this, and when the check fails they often delete the message rather than bounce it.

The fix is to send through a real email account for your domain, using its username and password. Most website platforms have a setting for this, usually called SMTP.

2. There is no mail code at all

Site builders, especially AI ones, often generate a form that looks complete but has nothing behind the send button except the thank-you message. Nothing is broken, because nothing was ever built.

The fix is to connect the form to a real handler. Your platform almost certainly has one built in.

3. The mail is delivered, but into spam

Sometimes the mail arrives and you never see it, because it went to spam. This happens when your domain is missing SPF, DKIM and DMARC — three DNS records that prove your mail is genuinely from you.

The fix is to add all three. Your email provider gives you the exact values to paste.

How to stop it happening again

The reason this is so expensive is that the failure and a genuinely quiet week look exactly the same from your side. There is no alert, no bounce, and no gap in the website.

The only reliable answer is to have the form used and checked on a schedule, from outside, the way a customer would use it — and to be told when a test message stops arriving.