HELP! What in this text is causing the email to not go through?

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    I have a customer trying to submit an order. He used my order form and I never received it. I went line by line testing is it his email, his name, his order options, and any combination I could thing of, and it led me to the text in the “Specific Notes” section of my order form.

    The top text comes through fine. But the second line “These are some of my favorite examples:” along with everything to follow, would cause the email to not go through. I deleted one line at a time leaving only the top two sentence lines below.

    “This is for a 1964 Blonde Fender Jaguar. I really like Speckled 60’s but with a tiny touch of crazy :)

    These are some of my favorite examples:”

    I now deleted the emoji symbol just in case, I deleted the “:” and it still wouldn’t send. Now I thought I’m narrowing it down, let me deleted one letter at a time. Then I deleted the “s” off of “examples” and then it sent and went through. What the heck!!!!?

    So for some reason everything after the “e” in “example” was causing the form to not send. What in the world is causing this? That was hours of my time trying to investigate what’s going on here. Below is the exact text directly copied and pasted from his original order/email. Please advise.

    This is for a 1964 Blonde Fender Jaguar. I really like Speckled 60’s but with a tiny touch of crazy :)

    These are some of my favorite examples:

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    BUMP

  • Unknown's avatar
    eyukaz · Member ·

    This is a really well-documented investigation and you were very close to the answer. What you have found is almost certainly an Akismet false positive, not a bug in your form.

    Here is what happened: WordPress.com’s Jetpack Forms automatically passes every submission through Akismet, Automattic’s spam filtering service, before the email ever reaches you. Akismet’s strongest spam signal is URLs in the message body, because the vast majority of spam that hits contact forms is people dropping links. When your customer wrote “These are some of my favorite examples:” and then pasted a list of links underneath, Akismet saw a message with multiple URLs and silently classified it as spam. No error was shown to your customer, and no email was sent to you.

    The reason your word-by-word test seemed to point to the “s” in “examples” is that you were inadvertently also deleting the lines that followed, which contained the URLs. The word itself was not the problem.

    The good news: the submission is probably not lost

    Go to your WordPress.com dashboard, then Jetpack > Forms (or look for “Feedback” in your WP Admin sidebar). There should be a Spam tab. Your customer’s original order is likely sitting there. You can mark it as “Not spam” which will also help train Akismet to be more lenient with similar submissions in the future.

    How to help future customers avoid this

    A few practical options:

    The simplest is to add a note to your order form telling customers to paste the links into a separate email to you rather than into the notes field. It is not a perfect solution but it prevents the problem immediately.

    You can also check whether your form has a way to reduce Akismet sensitivity for that specific field, though on WordPress.com the Akismet integration runs automatically and there is no per-field toggle available without a more advanced plan and custom setup.

    If this is a recurring issue because your customers regularly need to share reference links with their orders, it is worth contacting WordPress.com support directly to report the false positive pattern. When enough users report similar legitimate submissions as “not spam,” Akismet’s model adjusts over time.

    The short version: your form is working correctly, Akismet is being overzealous, and the order is almost certainly in your spam folder waiting to be rescued. Check there first.

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    Thank you so much for taking the time to look this over and for your helpful feedback.

    I checked in the “Feedback” section and its more advertising and no spam folder.

    I found the spam folder by going into the Akismet tab and then there was a spam link. There is and was nothing in my spam folder for some reason even though the graph shows a lot of spam on that given day when I was testing this.

    Regarding the “s” in “examples”, all the links were already deleted and I only had the line “These are some of my favorite examples.” with nothing below it, no links, no nothing. I submitted the form and nothing happened and it wouldn’t go through. So I deleted the “.” and it wouldn’t go through. Then I deleted the “s” leaving just “example” and then it went through. So weird. However, in one attempt I was able to post one link and that worked.

    The other odd thing is, the links he used are coming directly from my page that I personally uploaded.

    With this new information, do you have any other ideas? I would love to find his spam email and make it not spam. I don’t see anything in the folder even though the graph says 20 spam on that day most likely from me testing it out. Thank you again, please let me know any other steps I can take since these are great ideas, but haven’t solved the issue yet. Thank you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    eyukaz · Member ·

    Hey, thanks so much for testing all of that so carefully and reporting back.

    The fact that “examples” blocks it but “example” goes through is a really specific clue, and it points away from Akismet and toward something much simpler: the WordPress Disallowed Comment Keys list.

    Here is what that is. WordPress has a built-in blocklist under Settings > Discussion called Disallowed Comment Keys. Any word, phrase, or fragment on that list will silently block a form submission without showing an error to the person submitting it. Jetpack Forms obeys this list automatically. The tricky part is that WordPress matches partial words, so if the word “examples” or even just “amples” or “xample” is on that list for some reason, it would block any submission containing it while letting “example” slide right through.

    This list sometimes gets entries added by security plugins, spam protection tools, or even old tutorials that recommend pasting in blocklists. It is easy to forget it exists.

    Worth checking right now: go to your WordPress dashboard, then Settings > Discussion, and scroll down to the Disallowed Comment Keys field. Have a look through what is in there. You might find something that partially matches “examples” and does not match “example.” If you spot anything suspicious, remove it and test the form again.

    On the missing spam submissions: the graph counting 20 spam on that day was almost certainly counting the blocked submissions as spam events, but because they were blocked outright rather than held, there is nothing to display in the folder. Outright blocks do not always leave a recoverable record, which is frustrating but explains why the folder looks empty even though the graph shows activity.

    On your customer’s original submission: if it is not in the spam folder, it is most likely gone and will need to be resubmitted. Once you find and remove whatever is triggering the block, ask your customer to try again and it should come straight through.

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    Thank you again for the help and taking your time to go through this with me. I followed your directions into the settings, discussion tab and down to the Disallowed Comment key and that section is blank, nothing in there.

    However, there is a box 2 options down that is checked saying “Enable Blocks In Comments”. Is that what we think it means regarding blocking certain words and things in emails, or does that literally mean the block text thing having to do with formatting? I am going to uncheck it and see.

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    Also, I think the discussion tab is not the same as sending me a contact message using the contact form. Where would that be?

  • Unknown's avatar
    spitfire57 · Member ·

    Just tried his order again with links in original format, and it still would not send even after unchecking the “Allow Blocks”/”Blocks enabled”.

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