Contact Form 7 not working

Alright everyone. I’ve just signed up to this forum to share some information regarding this issue.

I also have a GoDaddy hosting account with WordPress and Contact Form 7 installed. And noticed less emails coming through from the website in the last week or so.

I decided to check it out and sent a few test emails with the “from” input field as @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, and other test @domains.
As others mentioned, the emails with the “from” field @yahoo.com, etc. did not go through. I decided to call GoDaddy, and of course after speaking with few support agents that told me they do not see any issues on their end and they cannot help me, I finally got to one that told me GoDaddy does not allow having email forms with the “from” field as @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @gmail.com etc.

I also found this article – https://help.godaddy.com/article/510
where you can find this statement on the bottom.
GoDaddy – “Our mail server will not send email containing a “From:” header entry of aol, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, live, aim, or msn.”

The solution –
After many tests I’ve finally got to the best fix that works out for me. What you need to do is change some settings in Contact Form 7.

1. Edit the “From” field under Mail to [your-name] <[your-email]>,<[email protected]> where the domain is your GoDaddy domain. Or you can just put an email address that is not @yahoo.com and such.
This works because you must have a “From” that is within your domain (according to GoDaddy). Basically you are not supposed to put an email address that is @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, etc. The only downfall is that when you reply to such an email, you will need to manually remove [email protected], unless you don’t mind getting an email of the replied message to your account.

2. Under “message body” on the right hand side, separate the name and the email fields so it shows – From: [your-name]
Email: [your-email] instead of From: [your-name] <[your-email]>.
This is very important, as even if all the setting are correct and this is not, the emails will not go through, so make sure the name and the email fields are on separate lines.

3. Now I’m not sure if you also need to have the “To” field under Mail to also be an address under your GoDaddy domain, mine is anyway. So if you’re still having issues with the form, try that too.

That’s it. You should be able to receive emails even if the “From” field contains @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, etc. addresses.

Another note, if you have the Fast Secure Contact Form plugin, they also mentioned in their settings that you can change the “From” field so that you can “Enable when web host requires “Mail From” strictly tied to domain email account“. Which makes sense in GoDaddy’s case.

Too bad GoDaddy doesn’t even notify their customers of that issue, I just hope I didn’t miss too many important emails.

Good luck to everyone and I hope you resolve this issue.
Thanks.

Hi guys,

I am having this problem but with Fasthosts in the UK, not on all sites though.

I haven’t bothered asking fasthosts as my confidence has almost completely gone in them.

I have recently set up a new site on media temple gs hosting and set up the exact contact form I was having trouble with (customised CF7) and the email arrived instantly…

I think it maybe time for me to switch hosts!

I have been struggling with this same problem with Custom Contact Forms. I’ve read through this whole thread, and I’ve tried everything in this post and still don’t get any emails. However, I do get my WP-DBManager and WordPress Backup emails. It’s just the contact form emails that don’t go through. Has anyone else who is having these contact form problems getting other emails, or are you not getting any emails at all?

Okay, working with John at https://www.johncachero.com/ I believe we have found a solution that yields better results. It still adds to the from email address, but we are getting our test emails from a multitude of different email addresses (including yahoo, hotmail and gmail) within about 3 minutes.

Basically, in the portion of the form where you set up the email you will actually receive, just change it to something like this-

From: [your-name]<*[your-email]*>

The asterisks seem to make all the difference. No idea why but other fixes have not resulted in emails coming through as quickly on average.

I will still be leaving GoDaddy’s hosting once my already purchased time is over.

Eureka boerbabe! That actually worked in Custom Contact Forms too! Wow. That makes no sense at all, but glad it’s working for now. Hallelujah! ??

I’ve been following this thread for a month or so. Fed up with godaddy I moved to 1and1 over the weekend. I backed up all my data and then pointed the nameservers to 1and1. Once my site was on 1and1 my contact forms worked great. I switched to php mailer and it was an instant delivery using yahoo, hotmail, gmail, and so on. I’m going to be moving all of my other sites off of Godaddy shortly. Godaddy dropped the ball on this one.

Andy, I am most likely moving to Small Orange next Tuesday. It was between them and 1and1, but I think Small Orange will serve me better. GoDaddy was good in the past but after all of this fuss and having my business site go down constantly for no reason and they refuse to acknowledge the fact… its time to leave.

After 3 weeks on 1and1 I noticed that they limit the size of photo uploads to 40m. Other hosts like GoDaddy and hostgator are 64m. This could be a major issue for some clients using wordpress that don’t know how to save a photo for the web or for users that want to upload photos via their iPhone or blackberry.
I’ve tried changing the wp-config file and the php.ini and a bunch of other things to adjust the 40m to 64m but I discovered that 1and1 doesn’t allow those types of changes on a shared server.
I plan on calling them at some point. I may cancel before my 90 days are up. I’m about to put one of my clients on hostgator. I’ll update when that is complete.

Hi Folks – I see this thread has been quite for a few months -did everyone leave GoDaddy….

Here is the latest experience I have had on a WordPress install. This morning in a 60 minute window I received over 30 emails from one of my WordPress site with one of the messages dating back to March 2011. It took over 5 months for this one email to be delivered.

When I contacted GoDaddy I got their standard response that emails are sent to a queue and it can take up to 1-2 hours for a message to be released.

I first experienced the receipt of an old email for this domain on Monday 8/22 – this message was dated 5/2/11. Then got another one on Tuesday 8/23 that was dated 4/14/11 out of WordPress. Then this morning received 33 messages.

Has anyone else seen this type of mass release of emails from the GoDaddy server?

Maybe this will save a beginner from a not so obvious mistake…

I just installed Contact Form 7 for the first time on WP 3.2.1. Having never used it before, I left the “Message Body” blank in the settings while testing. That amazingly caused the “# Sender’s message was failed to send.” error message. Once I added any text to the message body, it worked fine.

I have tried everything to get Contact Form 7 to work again. It was working fine 3 weeks ago without the need of SMTP plugins. I have WP-Mail-SMTP set up and I can send email tests successfully through localhost. I am using an email with the same domain name as my site in the TO and the FROM and still don’t get an emails. I get the green successfully sent box but no emails. I’m on IX Webhosting servers. Anyone has a clue as to what can be happening? My site is: https://sunriseartists.com

Thanks!

ClickfireCoder mentioned that she made this change in “Custom Contact Form” but I cannot find where to make this change. Can anyone help out with this?

Ryan, it’s been so long ago, I’m trying to remember. I use Gravity Forms now and try to stay away from GoDaddy, but look in the main section and where you have all the form parameters set up, look for the Destination Email field. You can also set a default from email in the General Settings for the plugin. Hopefully, one of those is what you need. Good luck!

Thanks for the reply. I chose to purchase Gravity Forms to see if this would resolve my problem. I love the software and it is very easy to use. The problem is that I still cannot use a recipient email address of AOL or GMAIL because the submission never comes through. Did you modify something to make yours work? Any thoughts? Thanks-

I modified by changing hosts. ?? Seriously though, no. The way I got it to work was by having it go to an email address on the same domain. You should have domain email, so a way you could get around it would be to have all your domain email forwarded to the gmail account, and that’s really easy to setup in gmail. I don’t have a solution for aol unfortunately.