Misconfiguration leads to mail delivery failure…

If an email is being sent from your website domain, it should now have a FROM address from that domain. This is because emails are being spoofed by spammers and are being sent from a different domain. Such messages are being routed into the Spam folder, and so best practice is now to include a FROM email address that is from the website domain. Look at the following setup:

== MAIL ==
To: [email protected]
From: [your-name] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [your-subject]
Additional Headers: Reply-To: [your-email]

What happens and why:

1. The mail is sent from the contact form to the email address specified in the TO field.
2. When you receive the message, it will have the sender’s name and be from the “wordpress” email address specified in FROM (This doesn’t need to exist, but it does need to be @your-domain.com).
3. By including Re: in the SUBJECT, you will ensure that the field always has some text in it, even if the sender does not complete this field (Best practice is to ensure that there is at least some text in the subject field). Or, you can make the SUBJECT a required field in the *Form* by adding an asterisk: [text* your-subject]
4. Adding the Reply-To: [your-email] in ADDITIONAL HEADERS means that you can reply to the sender by hitting the Reply button in your email client.
5. If you want to actually see the sender’s email address in the message you receive you can include it in the MESSAGE section. For example:

MESSAGE BODY:

From: [your-name] <[your-email]>
Subject: [your-subject]

[your-message]

So, while most users much preferred the old way of being able to see the sender’s email address in the FROM column of their email client, these changes are necessary due to the need to prevent emails from being incorrectly identified as spam.

I have the same lack of understanding with regard to this contact form as the originator of this post. If I read your response correctly, Contact Form 7 sends an email from myself to myself, that references a message from new contact that has occurred on the contact form page. And this is done so as not to inadvertently spam the new contact? Then how does the new contact find out that his/her message has been received? I’m not following this at all.

Contact Form 7 sends the email to you, using the sender’s name [your-name] and the <[email protected]> to show it has been sent from the contact form on your website, rather than from the sender’s email client. Yes, this is to prevent spam or spoofed messages (e.g. I send a message to you from my domain but pretend I am from the paypal.com domain). The sender’s message is included in the email, and you can reply to that message by hitting Reply in your mail client.

If you want the sender to receive a copy of his/her message, then you need to configure Mail > Mail (2) which is an autoresponder. For example:

To: [your-name]
From: You <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [your-subject]
Message Body:

Dear [your-name],

Many thanks for your enquiry.
One of our staff will respond to your request as soon as possible.

— Your message summary —

From: [your-name] <[your-email]>
Subject: [your-subject]

[your-message]

—
This message was sent via the contact form at Your Site.
https://www.your-domain.com

Thanks for the clarification Barnez ??

Thanks for the clarification and suggestion for the autoresponder.