Clearing up things w/ email, contact forms, hosting

  • Hello! So, I’ve been teaching myself web dev, WP, and all the related bits for a little under a year now and I just need some reinforcement about a few things.
    I’ve been having trouble getting Contact Form 7 (or any other contact form plugin) to play right with WP and Bluehost. I’ve finally found some forum posts on here and elsewhere that seem that they should help resolve my specific issues. What I am asking is that you guys just tell me if I’m thinking about this whole contact forms with WordPress through Bluehost (or GoDaddy) properly.
    If I want to make a contact form for any wordpress site, I have to create an email address under the domain wordpress is installed to so that wp_mail or mail() will work with it properly.
    If I am using Contact Form 7 along with WP-Mail-SMTP, I have to set the “TO” (in CF7) to the email I created in cPanel. I need to create a second email through cPanel and set that as the “FROM” address in WP-Mail-SMTP’s settings. Right?
    I didn’t think it would matter much what the “FROM” address in WP-Mail-SMTP was so I had it set to “[email protected]”. I also tried leaving it blank so that the plugin would use the WP/plugin default.
    Do I have to use email addresses made under the domain for any contact form in any WP installation or is this only for servers using cPanel?
    I think I’ve got my specific issues tied up but I want to really be sure I’m learning how this works the right way. Thank you so much for any help or comments!
    If it matters, the site I’m currently working on the contact form is .

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • The “to” (recipient) is pretty simple. It’s whatever account you want to read the contact requests at. It can be any email address you own.

    The “from” (sender) is more complicated and it absolutely matters what it is.

    Let’s say the recipient and the sender are both gmail accounts. You have to send the email through Google’s SMTP server (authenticated with your Google account credentials) or it will be rejected.

    Let’s say the sender is Yahoo and the recipient is Gmail. Now you have to deliver the email through smtp.mail.yahoo.com, again authenticated with your Yahoo credentials. When it reaches the Google recipient, Google will verify that the Yahoo sender details are correct or in the bucket it goes.

    Let’s say you don’t want to use a Yahoo or Google domain. You want to use a custom domain, like myawesomeblog.com. Now you need an SMTP server that will relay the email for that domain for you, and receive email as well obviously, and that means an MX record in the DNS zonefile of the domain. You will also need to setup an SPF record, and maybe a DKIM record as well. Lots of steps to ensure Google doesn’t toss your message or flag it as spam.

    Is it possible to use a sender of [email protected]? I don’t know. You would need to have an account with whichever SMTP server wordpress.com has authorized for use.

    At a very minimum to get WordPress to send the mail semi-reliably you must use an SMTP plugin. The default PHPMailer, which uses sendmail, which (likely) uses an unauthenticated SMTP server on the localhost, is not going to cut it in 2015.

    Thread Starter televators

    (@televators)

    Thank you for clearing some of that up. Unfortunately with the website I’m working on, I have to use Bluehost’s mail server so I can’t use the gmail or yahoo set up. I’m still lost on this contact form thing with bluehost and wordpress but I appreciate the tips.

    Then you need to rely on Bluehost to send your mail properly out into the world. That includes settings up the SPF and DKIM records for your domain. Hopefully they are a great host!

    https://www.mail-tester.com/spf/bluehost

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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