Hi @tamierp,
Thanks for reaching out to us!
I apologize, I’m not entirely certain what you meant by our plugin isn’t picking up the email address of the person who filled out the form.
Do you mean that you’re using the email address field as the “From email address” for the Notification Email? If you could provide some more details about this, it would help us to understand the issue that you’re seeing better. Screenshots or a screencast would also be very helpful.
In the meantime, the reason that we refer users who are experiencing issues with email delivery to a SMTP solution is because our plugin does not handle emails directly. All emails for your site are handled by your site’s email handler, which is usually provided by your site’s server.
What the various software on your site (including WPForms) does in regard to sending emails is provide the contents of the email, and where to/from the email is to be addressed.
If we were to draw an analogy of this with traditional snail mail, what WPForms does is write the contents of the letter, write the address on the envelope, place the letter in the envelope and then drops it into the mailbox to be sent. The mailman (representing your site’s email handler) would then come to pick up the letter from the mailbox and is responsible for delivering it to your intended recipients.
Why letters are not making it through though is most frequently due to anit-spam filters. If we were to again use the traditional mail analogy, a lot of our mail is delivered with an increasing amount of fliers/brochures/spam, and as such we’ve learned to skim the deliveries by our local postman.
However, if a letter or package was to be delivered by a courier or specific delivery person/service, we would be paying keen attention to this delivery and would implicitly understand that this is a genuine delivery. This is because couriers and delivery services expend resources to verify packages, their contents and the service costs their senders, which provides trust in the package.
This is what an SMTP service essentially does for emails, and it is why it will help your site’s emails to overcome anti-spam protocols that are currently preventing delivery of your site’s emails.
I hope this helps to clarify ?? Kindly,
