I was working on a WordPress website that uses the Contact Form 7 plugin for their main contact form. The company uses Gsuite (Gmail) for their business email, and they have an auto-reply set for all emails to their company. In order to comply with anti-spam requirements, Contact Form 7 was set up with a From address that matched the server and then the customer’s email was put in as a Reply-To. However, Gmail was not honoring the Reply-To for the auto-reply emails and was sending it to the From address instead.
This meant that customers were not getting the vital information in the auto-reply and the company was getting a bounceback every time they received a message from the website. Everyone was unhappy.
Solving this issue ended up being a really quick fix. In the form in Contact Form 7, I clicked on the “Mail” tab, and under “Additional Headers”, I used:
Reply-To: [your-email]
Return-Path: [your-email]
Gmail honored the Return-Path address for the auto-reply messages, but the spam filters were still happy because the From address still matched the sending server. Yay!
Hi! I tried this and emails are still going to the server address. 🙁 Any pointers?
I ran into this on another project where the hosting company was not honoring the information we set in the form and was overwriting it on their end. I have been trying to work with the hosting company to get it sorted out as this is a setting on their server that we can’t access. Which hosting company are you with? This issue was on BlueHost, but I’m sure it is likely to be an issue with other hosting companies as well.