Jetpack Contact Form Messages -> Bin

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in about this. I know you already said you disabled Akismet and the problem still persists. However, I’m still curious to know what your Akismet strictness option is currently set to. There are two options:

1. Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I never see it.
2. Always put spam in the Spam folder for review.

As the names imply, the first option aggressively trashes spam comments, contact form messages, and so on, while the second option (which is the default) sends spam to the “Spam” section of the Comments or Feedback screen for further review.

What you describe is possible under the first condition. Do you also know if ZeroSpam has the same or a similar setting?

Jetpack shouldn’t interfere with contact form submissions in this manner, so I’d recommend contacting Akismet support about the issue before we completely rule it out as a possible cause:

https://akismet.com/contact/

Kind regards.

Hi Daniel,

thanks for the response.

As I did say, yes akismet has been disabled for a couple of months now. After typing the above note I did though re-enable it (and disabled ZeroSpam) and checked the settings. It was set to review the spam, as I always did have it, as as I said above, I used to regularly check my Spam folder for the occasional (rare) good mail in there.

Also, even if I had selected the other option, it would just delete the mails without me seeing them at all, not putting them directly in the ‘Bin’.

No, ZeroSpam doesn’t have options like this.

Surely though it would be impossible for Akismet (or ZeroSpam) to be interfering with how contact form messages are submitted if they are disabled? Should I remove them all together and try?

Hi @lsbmarketing

I checked your connection with the Jetpack and it is not working correctly, as you can see on https://jptools.wordpress.com/debug/

That could be causing other issues with your contact form. Before we continue the contact form troubleshooting, we need to discard any Jetpack errors.

Could you please disconnect and then reconnect Jetpack? You can follow these instructions to do that:

1 – Go to the **Jetpack** menu in your WP-Admin dashboard
2 – Scroll down to find the *Connections* area.
3 – Click *Manage site connection*.
4 – Click **Disconnect** and follow the prompts to complete the disconnection process.
5 – Click the **Set Up Jetpack** button to connect your site to WordPress.com again.

This handy guide explains the full process in more detail:

* How to disconnect Jetpack: https://jetpack.com/support/reconnecting-reinstalling-jetpack/#disconnecting-jetpack

After reconnecting the site, check the Debug again, activate Akismet and contact us back to continue the troubleshooting process.

Let me know if you have any questions.

My best regards,

Michelle

Hi Michelle,

thanks for that. So, I did the following –

– disabled akismet and zerospam, cleared cache
– disconnected Jetpack through the WP Dash, cleared cash
– reconnected Jetpack through the WP Dash, cleared cash
– ran your debug tool and got the “XML-RPC is not responding correctly ( 404 )” error

I have checked that xmlrpc.php is present (it is, with its permissions set to 0644 – same as everything else) and there is nothing (that I can tell at least) in the htaccess that would be blocking it.

If I were to completely remove Jetpack and reinstall it fresh, would that break all of the contact forms I have on my site (most posts have a unique contact form on them).

Hi @lsbmarketing,

If I were to completely remove Jetpack and reinstall it fresh, would that break all of the contact forms I have on my site (most posts have a unique contact form on them).

It should not unless there is very heavy customisation on the theme, which doesn’t look your case. All the data related to the Jetpack features are stored in our servers, so you won’t lose any data. When you reconnect Jetpack, the system will “grab” back the data from our servers so you can see it again.

Let us know when you’re done with the plugin reinstall and activation, so we can check the connection again for you.

Okay then –

– disconnected & deactivated Jetpack
– uninstalled it and cleared cache
– ran debug tool and got the same error
– reinstalled Jetpack, reconnected and cleared cash
– ran debug tool and got the same xml-rpc error

Appreciate the help guys – what’s next to check?

Hi @isbmarketing –

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to access the xmlrpc.php file on your site. We’re getting a 404 error when attempting to access it.

I’d suggest checking if you have any security plugins activated that might be blocking our requests. If not, try contacting your hosting provider and asking them to check their security logs to see if they are blocking or otherwise limiting incoming and outgoing connections over XML-RPC.

Right, so next steps –

– I did have a security plugin installed called Sucuri. I had disabled and deleted it long ago, but it could have been active around the time this problem started (dont specifically remember)
– I reinstalled it to checked all of the settings and then deactivated it and uninstalled again.
– I also have Asset CleanUp, which does have an option to disable xmlrpc access, although it was not enabled. I enabled it, saved, then disabled it again and saved, just to toggle the settings.
– I renamed xmlrpc.php to test2.php and was able to access it, then changed it back again
– there are mentions of xmlrpc in the DB, but all but one are in zerospams logs and refer to hack attempts. The other mention is in wp-options and contains the list of update services – again not relevant.
– No mention of xmlrpc in .htaccess at all, so I added the following:
<Files xmlrpc.php>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>
– I can now access xmlrpc.php and get the “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” message
– when I run the debug tool I get
Debug Could not fetch your site data
We were unable to fetch the data from your Jetpack-powered site, the communication channel seems to be broken.
If you continue to get this error, please check out our troubleshooting guide or contact support.

It seems some things just wont go right for me ??

I’ve tried sending a few test messages through the contact forms but they’re all coming through – nothing is going to either ‘Spam’ or to the ‘Bin’. I’ll have to be patient I think and just wait for some natural traffic to come through.

I’ll come back and let you know how I get on. (I have re-enabled akismet, but not zerospam as of yet)

Hi there

Your Jetpack connection is looking good from our end now.

The only other reason I know of that contact form submissions would be sent to the bin is if they contained a word that is in the ‘Disallowed Comment Keys’ field in Settings > Discussion. Have you checked that?

Hi Dan,

thank you for your reply. I had two (actual SPAM messages) in the ‘Bin’ this morning, nothing in ‘Spam’

You may be on to something with the Disallowed Comment Keys – I have a list of some 43k words in there (don’t remember where I picked it up). I have removed it and will see how we get on.

Thanks

That sounds like it could be the culprit. I wonder if the zerospam plugin adds that list automatically perhaps.

Let us know if you continue to have trouble.

yep – that seems to have been the issue. Only a very small sample size so far, and no good emails wrongly assigned yet, but spam are going back into the Spam designation rather than to the Bin.

Thanks so much for your help guys – that was really annoying me!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by lsbmarketing.

Excellent, I’m glad to hear that this is resolved.