FAQ and Common Problems

This page lists (very) common problems users encounter with Webform. If the question you have is not answered here, please submit an issue to the Webform issue queue, after searching issues first. If you submit an issue to the Webform queue with one of these questions your issue will be immediately closed and you'll get a link to this page. Please mention that you have researched the problem here before submitting a new issue.

Common Problems:

• Not receiving e-mails
• White screen when submitting a webform

Common Problems

Not receiving e-mails

The most common cause of this problem is running your web server (or more importantly your SMTP mail server) on Windows. For whatever reason, many Windows servers are unable to send e-mails with the format "Name of sender" <email@example.com>. Instead, they are only able to send the shorter syntax of email@example.com. This excellent thread discusses some of the common symptoms and resolutions of solving this problem: warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 501 5.5.4 Invalid Address.

Solutions:

• Install the SMTP module to help your server circumvent this problem
• When configuring webform nodes, select a custom "From name" and leave the field blank. This will cause Webform to use the shorter syntax.
• Don't use Windows as your webserver. ;-)

Other notes:

Your entire Drupal installation might not be able to send e-mails. Check that you can receive e-mails by using the "Request new password" link (the Drupal path is "user/password") when logged out, or enable the Contact module (part of core) and try to receive an e-mail through that module. If you cannot receive e-mail from Drupal at all, please do not open an issue in the Webform queue.

White screen when submitting a webform

Usually this is caused by your webserver running out of memory. However, you can find out what is causing this error for sure by enabling error-reporting in your PHP installation. A blank white screen in PHP is commonly referred to as a "White Screen of Death", or WSOD for short.

To see the real cause of the problem, turn on error reporting with one of these methods:

• If you're working locally, you should edit your php.ini file. Update the line for "display_errors" to look like this:
  display_errors = On
• If don't know where your php.ini file is or you don't have access to it, you can do the same thing by editing your .htaccess file. Find the section of PHP settings for your version of PHP. If unsure, add this line in all three places (PHP4/Apache1, PHP4/Apache2, PHP5):
  
    php_value display_errors                  1

Now, try to perform the action that got you a white screen before. You'll probably get something like this:

This means that Webform does not have enough memory to process the submission.

Solutions:

• Increase the amount of memory allocated to PHP. You can do this in several ways: Increase the memory_limit line in php.ini, put a line like   php_value memory_limit 64M in your .htaccess file (below the display_errors option added above), or set the memory limit in sites/default/settings.php with a line such as ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');.
• Decrease the size of the webform. Webforms with more than 100 components will require large amounts of memory. Webforms with more than 400 fields is strongly discouraged.

Other notes:

White screens of death can also be caused by PHP code entered in the Additional Validation or Additional Processing fields. Remove any of this code or create a new webform node when trying to find the cause of an error.