In next version remove false "configuration errors"

I wouldn’t mind but the message “misconfiguration blah blah blah” CONSTANTLY pops up on every admin page and there’s no need for it.

@tdoccc

The From filed should really be an email address with the same @domainname.tld as your website.

You can use Reply-to: [your-name] <[your-email]> in Additional Headers

Take a look at the following:-
https://contactform7.com/configuration-errors/
https://kb.cf7skins.com/contact-form-7-configuration-validator

To expand on devinian’s correct comment – the reason it’s recommended to be setup like this is to prevent emails from being rejected as spam by a mail server. For example if the site domain.com sends an email that is from [email protected], the receiving mail server (myemaildomain.com) might flag that as spam or outright reject it, especially if domain.com is using strict email authentication, with the logic, “I just got this email that says it’s from [email protected], but anotherdomain.com doesn’t say that domain.com has permission to be sending this message, so I’m going to reject it…”

I’m guessing the reason CF7 developers added this feature in is b/c I’m guessing they’ve received a ton of complaints about contact form submissions not arriving in inboxes b/c of a similar configuration to what you’re using.

On another note, maybe you should have started your post, “Thanks for the great plugin I’ve been using for free for years on my website! I have a bit of feedback…”

You know what they say about catching more bees with honey than vinegar…

@nocabt / @tdoccc

from another thread… “the whole point of the update and validating your forms is to help you follow better standards to avoid messages being wrongly marked as spam.

e.g. In most cases you are sending messages to yourself (your own domain), so not a problem. But (as an example) if you configured your form to send messages to [email protected] and a person sending you a message used [email protected] you would probably never receive the email as Yahoo would consider it as spam (because it was not sent from Yahoo’s servers). The same would happen for @hotmail, @gmail etc…”

Yeah, apologies guys – I can see where you’re both coming from and might have been a bit too hasty.

@davinian,

This is how my own mail section is filled out on my website in my CF7. Can you please tell me if it’s correct? And if not can you please tell me how to fix it. Because it’s not sinking in my head and I’m not receiving emails. Thanks so much!

MAIL section

To: [email protected]
([your email] is a required field to ensure you don’t have an empty To: address)

From: [your name] <[email protected]>
(adding [your name] allows you to sort by the name of the sender
& apply filters in your email application)

Subject: [your subject]
(making Subject required in your form ensures you don’t have
an empty Subject field in your form email)

@mmglisci, this all looks correct.

In Additional Headers do you have?

Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]>

Are you still seeming any other validation errors? If you get an error on the Subject field you may need to add an * to the Form part like this.

<p>Subject (required)<br />
    [text* your-subject] </p>

regards,
David

@davinian,

I did what you said above and it is working. However, it didn’t until I deleted a plugin called “WP Better Emails” then it worked fine.

Thanks for all your help
Marilyn

I keep seeing “This contact form has 3 configuration errors.” yet I can’t figure out what is wrong?

I weeded out the obvious errors (like the ones mentioned above) and checked for the issues mentioned in the “How to Resolve Configuration Errors” page. However I can’t figure out what the problem is.

Your error message needs to at least give a clue like what rule am I breaking or if it is a syntax issue and state in the error message where the problem is. I’m hunting all over the contact form settings and not seeing any red text showing what and where the problem is. If it is a syntax issue, maybe highlight it red (like a spell-check) when you go to save it.

BTW: Hopefully it is not throwing an error because I am not using all the input fields from my contact form in the mail form. Some fields don’t need to be emailed, such as the ‘honey pot’ or the CAPTCHA fields.

If that is the case maybe you should place that message as a footnote or warning on form submission and not as an error.

While writing this out I thought another possible error to look for is form tag mismatch (a tag in the mail form not used in the contact form), however I did not find any of those either.

@schulz Can you find what field is showing the validation error? If you click through the tabs one show show a red error message below it. That error isn’t totally helpful b/c it doesn’t show the specific error, but it does show which field is causing it.

@nocadt

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/in-next-version-remove-false-configuration-errors?replies=12#post-8137399

“I’m hunting all over the contact form settings and not seeing any red text showing what and where the problem is”.

Going right back to the point of the original post, I would like to see a way of turning this configuration validation off from the CF7 settings in admin area please. There are some instances where errors are shown incorrectly when a client’s mail configuration is pretty complex (and has appropriate SPF entries etc).

For now, we can do it with the following filter:
add_filter( 'wpcf7_validate_configuration', '__return_false' );

Hope to see it as optional in next version, thanks for all the hard work!

I’m just ignoring the validation errors for now as I really want the [your-name] <[your-email]> to show the sender’s email details. If I don’t I get some garbled weird email details from bluehost, [email protected] (where website is hosted). I think there are some A name records or something like that to remove on hosting server for the domain.

Anyway, found that the WP-Mail-SMTP plugin by Callum McDonald no longer works to send the email via SMTP server. Even when I fix the validation errors that Contact Form 7 4.4 introduced. Anyone else experiencing the same issue?