Run into a contact form problem on a client’s site. The result of sending a contact request via a form was an error message display to the submitter and no email was sent to the admin of the form.
It turned out that the admin email was misconfigured, a totally invalid address was used and the software that was handling the actual transmission first tried to validate the address and failed because it didn’t.
This can be looked upon as one more case of dumb user failing to copy&paste his own email address, but once you start thinking of it you realize that the main problem is not whether the address was correct or not, but that the indication was displayed to the submitter while the site admin didn’t know anything about it.
And even if everything was configured correctly, will the admin be guarantied to receive the e-mail? not at all. Between having problem in his own POP/IMAP server, spam filters that identified the mail as spam, server upgrade that resulted in misconfigured mailing component, and SMTP server configuration change (password for example) to which the admin was not notified about, the chances that right now someone is not getting a contact request that was submitted successfully is pretty high.
Yes, at least on the server side it is possible to log whatever errors you can when sending the mail to the internet fails, but who really bothers to read the error log if he doesn’t know that there is something wrong, and how will you know if even when a problem is detected it is displayed to the submitter instead of the admin?
Isn’t it much better to keep all the contact requests in the server’s DB, and notify the admin that he has new contact requests awaiting him? This way even if the notification had failed he will still be able to access the data, and as a bonus it will be accessible even when he can’t access his mailbox.
It is probably not as simple for commercial organizations in which the contact form submission is just the first step in a sale, and it is convenient to track it in your mailbox, but hopefully this kind of organizations have better CRM solutions then just using email.