Reply-to doesn’t work anymore in Gmail

I’m still using Reply to with CF7 on many sites without problems.

Please supply all your input in the Form and Mail sections of the CF7 interface (add as code or include as link to screenshots), plus a link to your form.

This helps to understand your actual problem and offer a possible solution.

@smallstar67 are you, by chance, replying to emails using gmails newly updated web interface? Because when I try to reply to message using the new gmail webui, it ignores the reply-to tagging and replies to the sender. When I download the same message into my client (Thunderbird), it does reply to the reply-to address and not ourselves.

I’ve tested this against emails that were sent using an older version of CF7 so I don’t think it is a problem with the recent CF7 updates?

I see a few other users reporting this issue on the Gmail Product Help forums today.

@vineblog

I see a few other users reporting this issue on the Gmail Product Help forums today.

Please add a link to a relevant issue in the Gmail Product Help forums if you can – I’d like to investigate this.

I use paid google apps and i’m now seeing this… i was replying to myself for a little while ??

Yes this is 100% a contact 7 & gmail issue. But, I use a paid gmail account for everything, so….. I need a fix that works with gmail.

It’s really strange if gmail did not use the reply-to parameter. Anyone any idea why they would drop it? It seems like a basic email function – unless it was something that was being abused by spoofing?

Lots of people complaining about it here https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aVlo3QqT7MY;context-place=topicsearchin/gmail/gmail$20reply$20to

The thing is, I don’t think this issue is new with CF 7. I think it’s a gmail issue @smallstar67. If I go back into my gmail and look at emails that came from CF7 from earlier this year when we were using an earlier version of CF7 the gmail interface still does not honor the reply-to field. I’ll need to try and do more testing if it can be replicated outside of CF7 or if it is something very specific to CF7 causing the problem.

This seems somewhat unique to gmail’s web interface, but I honestly can’t say how long this issue has been present. I don’t actually use the gmail web interface to respond to CF7 generated emails. I can confirm that it works fine in Thunderbird and in the iOS Mail app. The Gmail iOS app behaves slightly differently and if reply it inserts both the from: and the reply-to: recipients into the message.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by skydivider.

Thanks, @vineblog

I need to do some investigation: just tried replying to an email from one of my sites from my iPhone mail app and it seems to do it properly, but checking gmail on my PC shows that it would also have replied to the correct address. Something fishy here – I’ve definitely found it replying to the wrong address, but from a different website.

I still think it is google side. I use domain aliases with Google and I just ran some tests with thunderbird using the reply-to function and Gmail handles it properly when I use I use the true root gmail domain address in the To: and From: fields with an external address in the Reply-to: field. When I use the domain alias as the to: from: and an external reply-to: address, then it fails to honor the reply-to: address. As such, I’m having a hard time making a case for this being a CF 7 problem in my testing…

and my domain aliases, I mean that the root domain for my G Suite account is:

myrootdomain.co.nz

and I have an domain alias attached that account which is different

myaliasdomain.com

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by skydivider.

well…I can’t really even implement this if I want to by changing CF7 because it won’t allow me to use a different domain for the email than website domain as it claims that would be a spam risk. Not sure I agree with that logic since I’m routing email from my webhost to myself using my own gmail authentication accounts. There’s a slim chance that this is being caused by the way CF7 formats the mail, but I can’t figure out how to test that….

Hi,

As @vineblog said, it seems to come from gmail (web-browser version at least) when you have your contact form “from” email being also set as an alias in your gmail settings.
As soon as I put another email in the “from” sender in contact form (that is not one of my aliases) i.e [email protected], the reply-to are working again!

I tried to revert back to CF7 v4.9 and issue remains (while it used to work on my setup with previous CF7 versions) so -in my case- it doesn’t come from CF7 updates.

Not sure if this is a temporary gmail behavior, but at least this can be a quick fix. Hope that can help some. Thanks @vineblog for pointing this out.

@soulshakepower

Bingo!

That seems to have worked for me too. I had a contact@<domain> mail account set up and Gmail fetches from that – that was entered as the To and From addresses in the CF7 form. When I changed the From address to contact-form@<domain> to make it different, replying from Gmail in a browser correctly sends to the correct email address.

Thanks very much for finding that out. I’m sure it’ll help many others too.

Changing the Reply-to Email address to a non alias gmail address didn’t work for me.

@smallstar67 what do you mean by “the Reply-to Email address” ?

Just to be sure, it is the address in the “From” field within your CF7’s form “Mail” tab settings that has to be changed to a non gmail alias (or to a unique address that is not related to an email account being imported in gmail). Lmk

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by soulshakepower.

@soulshakepower Thank you! That work-around fixed the issue for me. It has been driving me crazy! Hopefully, they will have a permanent fix soon.