Drupal contact form sending me duplicate emails

Question

I'm new to Drupal, just made my first site and having some issues with email. Two questions:

1. I've enabled the site-wide contact form, and sometimes though not always, I'll receive two identical emails from my site when someone submits a message via the contact form.

2. I've found documentation on Drupal's email handling very sparse. Can someone give me a brief rundown on how Drupal sends email? I have it installed on a godaddy server, and I have my own domain name, but I never set up any email services from godaddy or configured any emails settings for Drupal (e.g. SMTP, POP), so I was surprised it could send emails right off the bat. On this topic, is there a better way to handle simple email tasks like the contact form than by using the built-in email features of Drupal core?

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. I'm not sure. Can you replicate this problem yourself or is the just an occasional happening?

2. By default Drupal will use the PHP mail() function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php) which (usually) does not require you to do any explicit email configuration.

You can use the hook_mail_alter (http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer--hooks--core.php/function/hook_mail_alter/6) in a custom module to peer more deeply into the emails that are being sent. This does require an understanding of PHP.

A very widely used (and better) alternative to the Contact Form is the Webform module (http://drupal.org/project/webform). It provides a very easy to use interface to generate custom forms and does not require any programming knowledge.

If you wish to send more sophisticated emails you may want to investigate the SMTP module (http://drupal.org/project/smtp) which allows you to send to an SMTP server. Also, check into the MimeMail module (http://drupal.org/project/mimemail) as it allows for things like attachments and HTML emails without having to crack open and modify an email's headers via hook_mail_alter.

Answer 2

Answers

1. Hard to say, it could be a few things, but answering question 2 may give clues about question 1. I am guessing it is due to the configuration of your current email server.

2. Drupal can be configured to send mail LOTS of different ways, but by default it uses the built in php mail() function. This is configured in your php.ini. I would imagine that godaddy probably set up an SMTP or sendmail server by default.

For both of these issues, I would look at how things are configured (which, due to the nature of godaddy, may not work very well) or by talking to godaddy.

My recommendation would be to use google apps to host your email. Then you can have email sent from your domain but with google reliability, and having it be free!. To connect with drupal, use this module which requires PHPmailer, which may or may not be installed already by godaddy (they should support it though!).

Hope that helps. Leave any more questions in the comments.