Not a pleasant upgrade

@bobsled, oh that’s not good. Is it just coincidence or do you think it had something to do with the other plugin?

Let me know if you get stuck with anything — I think I have tested/updated enough sites now that I understand most validation errors.

Regards,
David

@davidian I’m (quite) sure it was the new plugin as the warning from my host came within hours of making the change. It may have been my fault in how I set the ‘Return-path address’ and ‘Mail From strictly tied to site’ settings.

The plugin was running fine however, but the warning from my host meant I had to make a decision.

I didn’t have time to start another plugin saga, so I changed back to CF7.

So far, all is cool. But I’ll wait a day or so to be sure my host is happy though.

Hi all,
It looks like we are all having the same problem with CF7. I’m not receiving any emails from the form. Can someone walk me through this? It was working before. I like others do not understand the support forums.

@mmglisci, I can try and help – the basic settings should be something like this.

1) On the Mail tab, check the To: field contains your email address where you want the emails to be sent.

2) In the From: field you should ideally be using an email address that matches your website (e.g. if your website is https://www.mywebsite.com then the email address in the From field should be something like [email protected] – it doesn’t need to be a real email address, but must contain your domain name)

3) In Additional Headers: add this Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]>

The above should be enough to validate the form without any errors and by using Reply-To: in the Additional Headers will mean the senders Name and Email address will be used in your email programme when you Reply.

If this doesn’t work, can you send a screen-shot of the Form and Mail tabs? Or email screen shot to me at [ redacted, support is not offered via email, Skype, IM etc. only in the forums ]

Regards,
David

I agree – I understand the spam issue, but most of my clients use these forms to get feedback/contact from users of their sites. To have an email TO them that is also FROM their site just doesn’t make sense. The whole point is to get the email FROM the user of the site.

FYI – I just tested one form after changing it to use [email protected] – and guess what – it went to the spam folder.

After spending all day working through the white screen of death when sending email via SES, I’ve rolled this back to 4.3.1. Thank <insert deity of choice here> for backups.

Most of the complaints here are about the changes to forms and tags, but I’d like to raise a complaint that this completely broke a different plugin, one of 2 plugins that allow WP to send email through Amazon SES.

I thought about posting this directly to the developer via their contact form, but they’re clear that “all support requests sent through this form will be ignored.” Does “your plugin broke another crucial plugin” count as a support request or a heads up?

We’ll have to see if the developer rolls through here anytime soon and addresses any of these issues.

@oskapt

To ensure you get the attention of the plugin author, I would suggest starting a new topic with a subject line specific to the issue: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/contact-form-7#postform

@davidian

Thank you, that worked for me. I also had a plugin that was clearly interfering with the CF7 plugin. So just in case anyone is using the WordPress Better Emails plugin once I deactivated it my form started working. Sending and replying to.

So thank you for your help!

@everybody who is having problems with the update!

I think we all need to remember what a contact form is used for. It allows visitors to your website to send you a message – at no point should it be thought of as an alternative to email. (if you want the visitor to email you, then show them an email address they can use (yes, I know as soon as you publish an email address, you will start getting spam)).

Generally a contact form allows you to collect the Name, Email Address, Phone Number, Subject and Message from the person wishing to contact you.

In the past the collected data was saved to a text file, then for convenience it was sent via email to you, then to make it even more convenient it allowed you to set the senders email address as the From address — this was great as it allowed you to quickly send a reply, but it is now considered bad practice as a lot of spam (spoofed email) is sent like this.

In 2014 Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc… all started using strict (DMARC) policies that rejected emails that were not sent from their own servers (e.g. you set your To email as [email protected] and the person using the contact form uses [email protected] — Yahoo knows it never sent the email from their server as it was sent by your contact form on your website, so Yahoo thinks it might be spam/spoofed and rejects it).

There are a number of way to prove the emails coming from your website are genuine, but the really simply way to resolve this, is to just set the From email address to be the same as the website domain name (e.g. https://www.mywebsite.com so use [email protected] <= you can add this to your email contacts so it isn’t wrongly marked as spam on your computer), then use the Repy-To: option in the Additional Headers field of CF7 so it uses the email address of the sender.

This way, you can still easily send an reply email to the sender — and you also avoid your emails looking like they are spam/spoofed if you use Yahoo, Gmail etc…

I know this is a long message – but the updates to CF7 are meant to help you run a better website.

I suggest reading the following to help understand how CF7 works and how to resolve validation issues.

Best Practice to Set Up Mail
https://contactform7.com/best-practice-to-set-up-mail/
How to Resolve Configuration Errors
https://contactform7.com/configuration-errors/
Contact Form 7 Configuration Validator
https://kb.cf7skins.com/contact-form-7-configuration-validator/

@davinian,

That’s great and all, but how about a choice? Many of us don’t need a plugin with control issues. The reason that many chose CF7 is because it did what we wanted it to do and it didn’t try to control who we did it.

May as well rename it iSO-CF7 the form maker for the inept.

@keeperbay, if you install CF7 from scratch it will work correctly – but because you started with an older version, you just need to make some changes.

I know it’s frustrating, but really it’s not difficult ??

@davinian

Difficult – Isn’t the issue.

Having to re-create 75 forms because CF7 now has huge control issues is a problem.

Directions or an explanation or a simple screenshot would have been nice, but the fact that CF7 no longer functions to server the need is a problem.

CF7 is now useless.

davinian, thanks for the explanation!

It seems like a great idea to me, i like software that enforces best practices so i don’t need to worry about forgetting them.

@david1103 I agree, a lot of my clients use @hotmail and @yahoo as their main email, so the update means they shouldn’t miss any messages/enquiries form potential customers.

@keeperbay CF7 is not useless, it is better (much better), you just need to update the “From” field and add “Reply-To” to your Additional Headers, you may also need to add a * to the Subject code if you are also using that.

I manage 60+ client sites and a WordPress Network of 200+ sites. Granted it was a bit tedious to go through them all and update CF7, but if you are not willing to mange and keep all the sites updated then perhaps find somebody else to do it for you!?

@davinian
I replaced CF7 with something that actually works and works so much better than CF7 ever did.

The update has turned into kind of a blessing. I didn’t realize how CF7 was holding my clients back.

There are many contact form plugins out there. I wasn’t looking at because CF7 just worked. Now that CF7 is a buggy hardly functioning plugin, I have found several Great plugins that do so much more than CF7 ever did.

I’ve been charging $10 per blog to help 100’s non-clients change over to a plugin that actually does what the blog owner wants and not what CF7 thinks the blog owner should want.