I ran across a peculiarity with google mail’s spam checking today. I’m running a bayarea firewood delivery site for a buddy of mine, and it has, among other awesome features, an order form containing a few ‘phone’ strings. When the order form is submitted, an email is sent out to a private email list which is ran using google site’s email app.
I made a few changes to the email script, tested them in the dev environment, pushed the changes to production, then made one final test in the production environment… and holy snikes it doesn’t work! I don’t get an email at my google email list when I submit the order form. What?? It just worked 10 seconds ago on my dev site!
- Revert the production code.
- Recreate problem in my dev environment.
- Track down source of problem.
Long story short, it turns out if I send an email to an email list handled by the google sites email app, and if it contains the string ‘555 555 5555′ then it doesn’t go through. Or at least it gets delayed by 1 hour+. I haven’t seen any of them yet.
Change that ‘555 555 5555′ ever so slightly – say to ‘555 555 5554′ and it goes through in seconds. Who would a thunk it.
I guess spam often has ‘555 555 5555′ in it? Moral of the story is a) to not get that phone number and b) don’t use common strings like that in your testing. (email@email.com?) It can introduce unexpected variables.