If you’ve recently sent us an email from one of our website’s contact forms or from within the Driver Easy software itself, and we didn’t reply, there’s a good reason. Well, maybe not a good reason, but a reason nonetheless.
Unfortunately, some emails sent from our product and our contact forms haven’t been making it to our inbox. But the product and forms were still telling senders their emails had been successfully sent.
The upshot? Some people – perhaps a lot of people – thought we were ignoring them.
Please rest assured, we were not. We simply didn’t know about the problem.
And unfortunately, it’s been a problem for way too long – since August 2017, in fact. So firstly, if your emails to us seemed to have fallen upon deaf ears, please accept our humble apologies. Your emails mean a lot to us, and the last thing we’d ever do is knowingly ignore you.
So what happened? Well, it’s pretty technical, but what it boils down to is this…
Back in August 2017, we migrated to Google’s G Suite. Its email system, Gmail, handles incoming emails differently from our previous email system. Gmail uses an email validation system called DMARC to prevent your email from being used for email spoofing, phishing scams and so on.
Unfortunately, a lot of emails sent by customers from our forms and product failed the DMARC validation because the email address in the From field didn’t match the domain of the server actually sending the email.
E.g. Bill enters bill@yahoo.com in the From field of our contact form, types a message and clicks ‘Submit’. Our email server then sends his message to our inbox. But because the email server is ours, it has a drivereasy.com domain, not a yahoo.com domain. And because these domains don’t match, the email fails Gmail’s DMARC validation and is automatically rejected. As a result, we don’t receive it.
Fortunately this didn’t happen with all emails – mostly just Yahoo and AOL emails. But that’s still a lot of emails.
You may say we should have known this would happen and, in hindsight, we agree. We definitely should have seen it coming. Unfortunately, we did not. We offer no excuses, and can only humbly apologize.
Anyway, onwards and upwards. We’re pleased to announce that as soon as we realized there was a problem (last week), and we figured out what it was, we fixed it.
So now if you send us an email from one of our website’s contact forms or from within Driver Easy itself, you can be sure we’ll receive it.
Hopefully we’ll hear from you soon! 🙂