Contact 7 Form – Not Getting Email

I just had this issue with my site. It has to do with the domain not having the correct SPF DKIM and DMARC and rDNS records.

The mail was being processed by the server, but in my case Gmail was bouncing it back. But without the proper records basically GMAIL did not trust the sender.

I am not sure if this is your exact situation. But once we added the records email came right through.

hmm were using outlook but I’ll look into this too.

Have you installed flamingo to see the the form is properly working?

If flamingo is seeing the email, set from the website. Then you have a server issue most likely.

Yah Flamingo is seeing the email. Sounds like server issue then.

When I ran an email report on my server I was seeing that I was getting this error

ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:128 CV=yes: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: 550-5.7.1 This message does not have authentication information or fails to pass\n550-5.7.1 authentication checks. To best protect our users from spam, the\n550-5.7.1 message has been blocked. Please visit\n550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more\n550 5.7.1 information. h63si78177ite.149 – gsmtp

My form was sending to a GMAIL account. Gmail was blocking the email because SPF/DKIM/DAMRC/rDNS were not set on the server to resolve the server.

I am not sure what type of hosting that you are using, but it is something that you may want to look at.

I used this website to run some scans and it showed the issues.

https://mxtoolbox.com/

actually use this one
https://mxtoolbox.com/domain/

same site, but different tool

Since the plugin was bundled within your theme, just save your forms and uninstall contact form 7 form your WordPress site, and reinstall from your admin panel or via FTP If that works then you had a bad version of the plugin.

If its reacts the same then rollback your WordPress platform (4.8.1 —> 4.7.5)

Before the rollback check your MX records are set right within DNS

@davisadmin, @blplaques, @clarkevans7,

I’m not associated with Contact Form 7, but I can definitely help here. I’m the lead developer of WP-SpamShield (which does provide spam protection for CF7), and we’ve been using CF7 for a very long time, almost since it was released.

The issue you’re talking about is a common one among contact form plugins. It’s not specific to CF7. The issue has a lot to do with email being sent from the server, instead of using SMTP on a real email account. In the past few years a lot of developments have been made to combat spam emails, and @blplaques hit on that a bit mentioning SPF, DKIM, DMARC.

In a nutshell SPF adds a layer of protection by specifying which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain. DKIM and DMARC each take that a step further. Then you have email service providers like Google and Yahoo adding in their own rules about what they will and will not accept.

The CF7 docs have a couple FAQs that address this issue:

• I see a response message “Thank you for your message. It has been sent.” with green border, but I never receive a mail for that.
• Best Practice to Set Up Mail

There is a lot more to it, but TL;DR: Sending email from your website’s server is not reliable, so the only reliable way to do it is to use SMTP on your site to send email from an actual email account on your domain (or on gmail.com, etc.)

Basically you set up a real email account for your site, and use a secure API to transmit email from this account’s SMTP server. (We find Gmail to be an easy one for most people to use, but there are a number of others.) The nice thing too, is that all of these emails will be in the Sent folder of that account if you ever need to track one down.

There are a number of plugins to do implement this. Just search the plugin directory for “SMTP”. Easy WP SMTP is a good one, but there are others as well. It just replaces the stock functionality of the WordPress wp_mail() function, and instead of using the server’s mail functionality, it uses SMTP. Boom….reliable.

I definitely recommend adding SPF records, DKIM, and DMARC, but all those take time, and if you want to fix this problem fast, use an SMTP plugin. (As others mentioned Flamingo is handy as well for making sure you don’t lose any data if an email does not arrive.) That will fix the immediate issue, and you can work on the other steps later.

We use CF7 heavily, and rely on it. Using this method to send WP’s email is the most reliable method possible, and for years, we have zero issues on our sites or client sites.

If you want more detailed info on this type of issue, we have an FAQ about it with more info:

• Q: The contact form emails, new user notification emails, or comment notification emails never seem to reach my inbox. What might be causing this?

That was initially written for WP-SpamShield’s built-in contact form, but since it’s a universal issue, the FAQ applies to all contact form plugins really.

Hope that helps!

– Scott

I am actually going to be moving to SMTP. I just needed to find a good one.

The webiste I am working on right now is brand new and I learned a lot about the way email.is being handled now.

Thanks for the great advise!! Im testing our the Easy SMTP but Im getting an error with my phpmailer about the server. So now I’m going to troubleshoot that.

Glad to help! ??

I have inherited a web site set up professionally on WordPress with a CF7 form included.
I have added four more personalised ones for various different groups of members and a test one and added multifile uploads to each and the original one as well inserting different multifiles IDs in each.
The test and the committee ones work but the committee to members and the members to Members ones show the message sent but no emails arrive.
I was able to add subject boxes and change the texts and font colours to differentiate the different groups and tested these with my test form with success.
I am a newbe to wordpress and can’t find a difference in the texts which would cause this problem.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by hostga.

@hostga – you should focus on differences in the content in the Mail tab. This is most likely to be the cause your email sending problems on some of the new forms. It sounds like some of the emails are being treated as spam.

See If You Have Email Problems – Your email may be treated as spam is one of the items listed.