Contact Form 7 and Anti-Spam

11 Replies

DreamHost has a fairly simple anti-spam policy, which can be summed up as this: You cannot send email from an address that isn’t your domain.

If that was greek to you, don’t worry. What that means is that my WordPress blog here can only send emails as elftest.net. That poses a small problem if you’re not using your domain-name to send email (a rare occurrence in WordPress), and a large one if you happen to be using the popular Contact Form 7 plugin.

Contact Form 7 lets you create robust contact forms for your site, however it has one minor ‘flaw’ (and I hesitate to use that word). When it sends email, it sends it from the user who submits the form. DreamHost, naturally, doesn’t like this. joe@gmail.com isn’t an elftest user!

Thankfully there’s a work-around for you, and it’s really easy. For most people, the plugin SMTP Configure, once installed and activated, will automatically fix this for you! It’s written by a reliable and trusted programmer, and I highly recommend it. Remember! Once you install the plugin, just activate it. For the vast majority of people, this was it. Everything magically worked.

Then there were some people who came and said “No, this does not work.” I’ve yet to reproduce it, but one person told me that after putting in his SMTP credentials, just like you would setting up email clients, it worked perfectly.

Additional: If you’re using Jetpack’s contact form, and you’ve changed the ‘to’ email address, you will also need this plugin. You’ll know you’re using that option because you’ll see this in your contact form shortcode:

to="me@myotherdomain.com"

 

11 thoughts on “Contact Form 7 and Anti-Spam”

  2. arjuna

    somehow it doesn’t work for me. i’ve tried a lot of contact form plugins to see if one would work, all would say email sent, but emails didn’t arrive. yes, i’m trying to use an address that is not @mydomain.com (it’s gmail). thinking smpt configure would work around this, i installed it (first i actually installed WP-Mail-SMTP which didn’t work either and so i deactivated it) and now emails are not sent anymore at all (“Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method.”)

    any ideas?

    thanks a lot!

    Reply ↓
    1. Ipstenu Post author

      First change it to an email that IS yours :) Just to make sure that you don’t have another plugin conflicting.

      Remember that it’s the ‘from’ email that has to be yours, not the to.

      Reply ↓
  3. Alex Hendler

    Hi, This plug in didn’t work for me either – I clicked “activate” as suggested by the author, then went back to the Contact Form 7 to test it and got this error message:

    “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method.”

    Anything I should do in Settings to fix? I’m using DreamHost.

    Reply ↓
  5. Jess

    Thanks so much for your help! My client hosts on Dreamhost and we noticed some contact forms were not getting through. I set this up and now everything is working great. But, for me, it wasn’t as simple as just activating the plugin. I had to change some of the default settings (SMTP host and Use SMTPAuth) to get it up and running. Thanks again.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ipstenu Post author

      I’ve heard that from a couple people, but they’re the minority. I’ve been making note of everyone who has that problem, so I can see if there’s a better fix that we can take care of on the DH side :)

      Reply ↓
  7. Eric

    I installed this to TRY to get Contact Form 7 working on dreamhost. I use outlook.com as the mail provider and figured out the correct SMTP settings. However, now EVERYTHING from the contact form shows as being “from” the SMTP account used to authenticate. Even using the “replyto” header addition will not show the “from address” that was actually entered with this form.

    Hours spent on something that should work out of the box. Any help appreciated

    Reply ↓
    1. Ipstenu Post author

      At a guess, you’ve setup CF7 wrong, since you should be able to put anything in the reply to and have that work (even ‘bibbeldy@domain.com’) but that’s something to ask that plugin dev directly.

      Reply ↓

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