A few days ago I received a mail from a reader, notifying me that my contact form was not working. I use Contact Form 7 on my blog and I was very surprised by the fact that it was not working. It usually is just plug and play.
The error message I was getting was “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.”. A quick Googling and I came upon this post by Mario Vargas. I then realized that the error I was getting was because my mail settings were messed up. You can find my mail settings on the screenshot below:
Wrong config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.
As you can see, I was using the reader’s email address to send me emails. This was the wrong thing to do. Even if the mail would be sent, it would be flagged as spam. As a general rule, you should only send emails belonging to your domain from your domain. (send only @technoreply.com mails from www.technoreply.com).
So, I applied this formula. I changed the senders email to one that belongs to me. The screenshot below speaks for itself:
Good config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.
This simple little trick worked for me. It saved me a lot of time since I did not have to tweak my server.
July 17, 2012 at 11:03 am
I had to use Alex’s suggestion and include this in the subject body section of the e-mail to get mine to work:
From : [your-name]
Message body :
[your-message]
August 14, 2012 at 9:55 am
If you’re on a Windows server (sympathetic hug), this might be a slightly bigger issue related to PHP’s mailer function. I found the solution via http://www.gravitationalfx.com/fixing-contact-form-7-failed-to-send-your-message-error/, in which they recommend using the WP Mail SMTP WordPress plugin, which “reconfigures the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail() and creates an options page to manage the settings.”
The server I was working insisted on refusing to work, so I dug a little deeper and found a list of free SMTP servers you can use as an alternative to your own server, if it’s like the one I’m using and is full of hangups and insecurities. Poor guy. I don’t have that link at hand but you know… Google it. I tried several servers until I found one that worked, and that was that. Errors were erradicated, mail was sent, champagne was poured.
August 19, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Thank you very much for this post. This was BIG HELP.
Keep up the good work!
August 22, 2012 at 11:23 pm
ghghghhgh
September 10, 2012 at 1:56 am
Actually its a perfect way running wordpress version 3.4.2 on nginx with php 5.3 and it worked like a charm
October 8, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Thank you friend.
You have made my day
November 13, 2012 at 10:06 am
Thanks for posting this. I discovered that when I migrated from my dev server to my prod site that my Contact Form 7 lost most of its Mail and Mail (2) settings. Your post helped me know where to look and notice the problem.
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December 17, 2012 at 3:44 am
thank you, you saved my customer and time
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February 19, 2013 at 10:50 am
Thanks to much, so saved me alot of time!!!
March 5, 2013 at 1:49 am
why my message is faild why
March 6, 2013 at 7:58 am
Awesome … Solution…
Worked for too…
March 10, 2013 at 11:22 am
Jevin, you are my HERO mister. Thank YOU ever sooooo much. Once I’ve posted my comment, I’m off to another blog who is rating higher than your right now, and I’m going to correct them. They are WRONG and your fix WORKED! Yaba-daba-d0000
{{{HUGS!}}}
March 21, 2013 at 6:48 pm
Thanks a lot for this. It really helped
March 30, 2013 at 3:26 pm
i m write to email in genera; setting then this email is display to contact form 7 inTO: field…. so tell me to and from email is write to different???? and i saw the result in my google email address so its generate FROM field or TO field??
April 3, 2013 at 12:44 am
Saved the day! Thx!
April 3, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Thanks Jevin, your insight was a big help in resolving this issue.
April 9, 2013 at 12:25 pm
I followed all the steps but it doesn’t seem to work for me, I still see the message when trying to send an email.
April 15, 2013 at 2:38 pm
Thank you very much
This post helps me a lot…
Thanks
Gauri
April 19, 2013 at 8:58 pm
I had this happen to me as well. Somewhere between my updates of WordPress 3.3 and 3.5.1, my settings got borked, and the contact form stopped working. Thanks for confirming that this was the issue.
April 20, 2013 at 10:36 pm
Great Post this was of great help. Still wondering how it was working before?
April 22, 2013 at 6:18 pm
I’ve tried to but it don’t work for me:S
I’ve set in the ‘to’ my contact@mydomain
and in the ‘from’ aswell my contact@mydomain
May 10, 2013 at 5:03 am
did not work for me.
May 10, 2013 at 10:51 am
Hi, Thank you so much for this help. It works for me.
Thank Again
May 24, 2013 at 4:23 pm
you saved the day
thanks a lot