Getting Email to Work

I feel like an idiot because I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be very basic, but I just can’t wrap my head around this for some reason.

I have a contact form on my site, but I’ve tried doing a couple test submissions but I never actually receive any emails, not sure what’s going on.

The Contact Form 7 seems like it already assumes the reader understands how it works, and doesn’t actually tell me anything (or maybe I’m just a poor whiny noob)

What I’m not understanding are the “To” and “From” fields in the Mail tab.

I found [this page](https://justlearnwp.com/how-to-use-contact-form-7/), and it kinda helps, but I’m still confused.

This I understand:

> Insert email address you want all contact forms to be sent to in the “TO” field

Makes sense. If someone submits a form, it goes to this email address. Simple.

But then there’s this:

> Insert valid address the server will use to send you contact forms in the “FROM” field

…what?

What’s even more confusing is that the default entry in the From field is: [your-name] <[email protected]>, but this also doesn’t make sense. [your-name] inserts the form submitter’s/user’s/whatever’s name, not me the site owner’s name. So why would it be the form submitter’s name paired with my email address?

So far all I’ve gleamed from this is that whatever email address is in the form field, the @domain has to match the domain name of the website, otherwise CF7 gives you an error.

Can someone dumb this down and explain this to me? What exactly is happening here? I feel like I’m missing something

EDIT: my boss just informed me that the email address in question is actually just an Outlook distribution group, not a standalone email address. I don’t know if that matters. I think maybe there has to be an email address set up with my web hosting service? Maybe? idk

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]