Media Realm’s Radio Websites allows you to send form submission emails (Gravity Forms Notifications) from custom domain names. This articles explains how our Radio Websites send emails, and how you can customise the domain names you send emails from.

This article refers to transactional emails – emails sent immediately upon form submissions. For information on linking your Radio Website with Newsletter services (e.g. MailChimp and MailerLite), see our separate articles.

By default, all emails from your website are sent from an address like this:

[email protected]

This default email address is perfect for internal email notifications – if you only ever want to send form emails from your website to your own team, then you don’t need to do anything. This is the easiest option, and requires no additional configuration.

These emails send via our own managed email service, which uses SPF, DMARC and DKIM. This ensures emails are authenticated and sent securely.

Sending Emails From Your Own Domain Name

If you want to send form notification emails to your listeners, visitors, and customers – then this default email address is not suitable. Users of our Pro and Premium plans can customise the email and domain name they send emails from, but it requires some setup.

Gravity Forms Email Settings & DNS Setup

To setup emails from your own domain name, you must verify your domain name by adding three DNS records. This is a technical setup step that will require assistance from your IT team.

If you don’t know how to add DNS records, and don’t have someone in-house to do this, please contact our support team – we’ll be happy to help.

This procedure will allow you to send emails from the same domain name as your website. For example, if your website domain name is www.mediarealm.com.au, then you’ll be able to send emails from [email protected].

Before we begin, login to WordPress as a Site Administrator.

Email settings are found in WordPress Admin > Forms > Settings > Emails.

This page shows you the setup steps and verification details:

The top of the page lists three DNS records. These three records must be added to your DNS host before you can send emails.

Once you have added your DNS records, come back to this page in a few hours time. If validation succeed, refreshing the page after a few hours will show your verification status:

If Validation does not succeed within 24 hours of adding your DNS records, please contact our support team.

Configuring Form Notifications

You may now configure your Form Notifications to send from your own domain. Notifications are the emails sent from Gravity Forms every time a form is submitted. Every form may have 1 or more Notifications. For example, you could have one notification send to your internal team, and a second notification send to the visitor themselves.

Go to WordPress Admin > Forms > (Form Name) > Settings > Notifications > Edit Notification.

You may edit the “From Email” to be [email protected]. For example, if your website domain name is www.mediarealm.com.au, then you’ll be able to send emails from [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], etc.

You may also customise your Reply To email to be another email address, or your visitor’s email address (so pressing ‘Reply’ will send an email to the person who originally submitted the form).

Bring Your Own Amazon SES Account

If you wish to have more control over your email sending, then you will need to provide your own Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) account.

The most common use cases for this option are:

  1. Sending emails from different domain names
  2. Monitoring your email delivery rate
  3. Sending large volumes of email

You may add your own AWS credentials to WordPress Admin > Forms > Settings > Emails > Email Sending From Custom AWS SES Account – Settings.

To setup these options:

  1. Sign up for an AWS account.
  2. Go to AWS SES.
  3. Apply for Production (non-sandbox) access.
  4. Add your domain & verify via DKIM records.
  5. Create SES SMTP credentials.
  6. Create SES IAM user with role ‘AmazonSESFullAccess‘.
  7. Add SPF Records.
  8. Add your SMTP & IAM Users to “Email Sending From Custom AWS SES Account – Settings” in WordPress.

Once you have setup this AWS account and connected it to WordPress, the verified domains will appear under the heading “Email Sending From Custom AWS SES Account – Sending Domains“.

You may now configure your Form Notifications to send from any verified domain.

Sent Emails Log

Every email sent from your site is logged within WordPress, so you have a full audit log of all emails that we attempted to send.

To access these logs, go to WordPress Admin > Stream.

All Email logging information is stored under the context ‘Email’. Actions are either ‘Email Success’ or ‘Email Failure’.

These logs provide four details for each email:

  • Status – Success/Failure
  • To Email Address
  • From Email Address
  • Subject Line

For privacy and security reasons, we do not log the Email Body.

A ‘Success’ status indicates the email has been accepted by AWS. It does not necessarily indicate successful delivery to a recipient’s mailbox.

A Note On Payment Receipts

While it is possible to send a payment confirmation from your website, we recommend you use a CRM or Accounting system to send all payment receipts.

Our Pro and Premium plans support Zapier integration, which you can use to send form submission data to many of these third party systems.

The main reasons we recommend this are:

  • It is important to have a system serve as your single source of truth for financial information, including receipt information.
  • There are often legal and tax obligations (e.g. tax deductibility rules) which require strict accounting controls – our platform is not designed to manage these controls.
  • It’s often not possible to create advanced logic within Gravity Forms to setup your receipt emails exactly as you need them.
  • Gravity Forms does not have knowledge of Recurring Payments, and thus can’t be used to receipt any ongoing payments (e.g. monthly donations).