I moved a client’s WordPress site to a new hosting company. The new hosting company had much stricter e-mail rules than the old host. Everything on the site was working after the migration except for Contact Form 7. The form said it had submitted successfully, but the e-mail was never received.I knew the new hosting company would not send e-mails that were not from the website’s local domain, so I went in and adjusted the “From” field in Contact Form 7. It was originally:
[your-name] <[your-email]>
I updated it to be:
<noreply@domainName.com>
and added a Reply-To header to the “Additional Headers” box:
Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]>
Still no e-mail getting through. I did some more digging and came across these two articles:
The first link is on the Contact Form 7 Support site. It has a section at the bottom for trouble-shooting e-mail sending issues. I was disappointed to see that their help articles on the various issues that could arise take a rather snotty tone and criticize hosting companies that have implemented e-mail sending security measures, but to each their own, I guess. The crux of the matter is that I did not find a solution in their support articles, and I’m including it here because there were lots of other answers there and I want to keep track of that page in case I run into issues in the future.
The second link is a blog post by Kaspars Dambis, and even though he doesn’t directly say the solution in his post, his post helped me figure this out. I had updated the From field in Contact Form 7, but Kaspars left the From as is and added Sender and Reply-To headers in the Additional Headers field.
I went back to my Contact Form 7 settings and changed the “From” field back to:
[your-name] <[your-email]>
and updated the “Additional Headers” field to:
Sender: noreply@domainName.com
Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]>
The contact form e-mails now worked and were successfully being received. So, even though you didn’t come out and say it, thank you Kaspars for helping me figure out that you have to leave the From field as is and overwrite it with a Sender header. Who knows why, but I’m glad it’s working now.
RE: helping me figure out that you have to leave the From field as is and overwrite it with a Sender header
Sorry but you are not correct. You definitely do not have to leave the From field as is – in fact it can create problems if you do.
Kaspars excellent article explains how to overcome some of the problems that can happen with using the default [your-name] .
As a general rule for email formatting, you should not leave the From field as is. However, if you modify the From field in Contact Form 7, it will disregard the other headers. This is something that I hope they fix in future versions.
Thank you very much for this post!
Even though I still have huge problems with Contact Form after migrating to another host (mail are delayed or even not sent at all) after changing Additional Headers I started to receive test mails at least sometimes… Yay! :))
In my case, only the setting of Mail (2) section of Contact Form 7 are not working. The mail setting defined in Mail (2) section are not sending any email at all. I tried to solve the problem, it is not working.
Only the first section of the Mail Settings are working fine.
Aooreciate your help to solve the problem.
Tarek
I have found that the latest release of Contact Form 7 has solved the issue, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, try upgrading to see if it solves it for you too.
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