I don't understand the mail tab at all

You are not the only one! I have been using Contact Form 7 for years and now I am having trouble setting it up – in the Mail section.
This is the email that comes to you from your website containing the information filled in by the person sending the form. Most issues seem to stem from what to put in the TO and FROM fields. I can no longer receive the email address of the sender if I follow the current instructions.

Jasnick,

I think the best solution could be this.

To: The email you want the form submission to go to.
From: An email address and name associated with the server/domain/site

Then ADD in Additional Headers: “Reply-To: [your-email]”

This will mean the email will come to you with correct sender/header, but when/if you reply to it, then the reply will go to the submitter of the form.

At least that is my 2c..

Thanks for responding so quickly! OK so I was correct in my original assumption that the mail was coming to me from my website ( well actually to someone else involved with the site but same difference).

Now there is something in the documentation about using wordpress@mydomain.com as a from address right…is that literally “wordpress”@etc. ? Is that automatically generated or do I need to create one from the sites cpanel or whatever they are using? ( I am helping out on a site that is not mine so there is some info I don’t have yet).

In the current form, the “to” field just says [your email]. I didn’t configure the form but I think that is a mistake. Based on the documentation regarding tags, I think that would send it to the person who filled out the form right?.

I know they would like it to go to a yahoo email, but if I understand correctly that could be problematic??? I was just thinking of configuring their settings in the cpanel to forward to the yahoo email as I did for mail on my domain.

Is it possible to put the same address in both the “to” and “from” fields? (I have emailed stuff to myself like this before within yahoo or outlook but I don’t know how WP would handle it.)

Kind of convoluted I know but I hope it is clear enough ??

ngolay,
To: is the email address that you want the forms results sent to.
From: is the name of the person filling out the form “[name]” followed by <wordpress@domain>. “wordpress” is literally the word wordpress and @domain is the website domain that the form is residing on.

I’ll do my best to keep things at a basic getting started level.

The Mail tab is for sending 1 or more emails when someone submits your form.

You can send 2 completely different emails using Mail & Mail (2) if you want.

For example you might use Mail to send an email to your business with the info filled in the form by the user.

At the same time you can use Mail(2) to send an email from you to the person that filled in the form to thank them for completing the form.

The role of Mail & Mail(2) is up to you. You could reverse the roles used above and the To: & Form: fields would need to change accordingly.

The most important thing to remember is that To: From: & Subject: are email fields – just like when you are sending a normal email.

I appreciate your replies. Very kind of you to break it down for me. Thanks!

oops I needed to confirm one more doubt I have for the subject of this thread. I am trying to configure the form so that it will go to a yahoo email. As I said previously I got the sense that this might be problematic but I wasn’t sure if yahoo was a problem for the “to” field or just the “from” field. The form isn’t sending and I am trying to figure out if the yahoo address in the :to” field is the problem ??

Yes, I will have to check with the owners of the site whether their info@mydomain.com is valid, or I can switch to wordpress@mydomain. I just don’t currently have access to the cpanel or however they access their backend to verify the configuration of their email.

Your reply is much appreciated thank you.

Thanks @buzztone I will visit the link you recommend as well, I had not seen that reply ??

grimpond – you are right! I was confused because I am used to getting website emails with the form sender’s email next to the name. However, I tried replying to one of my test emails and sure enough up came the sender’s email address even though it is (now) not visible in the email I received. Thanks!