Odd Junk Mail Filter Issue
I was asked to look into an issue as to why a client was not getting an email sent to them when a form was submitted.
I started by attempting to recreate the problem. After submitting the form, it acts as if it succeeded. It doesn't give you an error and it says that everything went as planned and that they'd get back to you shortly.
It seemed a bit odd that there was no error, if there was an error sending the email. Inetium wouldn't develop something that would ignore errors and act as if everything was fine, so I figured there was another issue, something that somehow glossed over any error, and that it wasn't Inetium code.
I went to the point where the email was being sent and replaced all the information in the email (to, from, body) with dummy values (and my email address, of course) and it came to me, so I knew that was where the problem would be found: the email. I put one field back in at a time and resent the email. It worked or every item in the email except the body. So instead of emailing it, I spit it out to the browser to see if there were malformed tags or something. I had no leads, so I decided to divide and conquer (using that term loosely).
I put half of the text out and sent it to me and it came.in the email. Then I tried 3/4 and that came, too. I got to about 90% of the email before it broke. I finally figured out it didn't like the word "Comments" - in that order. "Comment" was ok, and it didn't matter if "Comments" was the whole word or part of it. And it didn't matter where in the body of the email the words was, it always killed the email. So, since this was part of the email they were putting together - "Notes/Comments:" - I just changed it to "Notes:" and it worked fine... sort of.
It sent all emails to my junk mail box. I called the client and asked them if they got a test submission I sent and they said they did, so I was done, but still perplexed. I didn't think much of it until this morning.
I got an email this morning from Inetium's mail server saying it had blocked some "suspicious" emails. I went to check it out and... ALL of the emails that didn't send to me before were caught by the junk mail filter. This led to the mind-boggling conclusion that the word "Comments" had thrown some kind of red flag to the email server and moved my mail from my Outlook junkbox to some evil, blocked email area.
Does anybody know what in the world would have caused this? Mike suggested that it wasn't so much the word "Comments" as possibly a group of words together, one of which is "Comments," in any order in the body of the email of course. The page is up and running, but it's just really confusing and I'd like to have a better handle of what was going on. It might be a question better suited for Infrastructure people, if you have any insight.