Contact Form 7 does not store submissions. If the notification email does not arrive, the lead is gone, so a delivery problem on a Contact Form 7 site costs more than it does with most form plugins. The good news is that the plugin tells you where to look.
Read the color of the response message
Submit the form yourself and look at the border around the message that appears below it.
- Green. Contact Form 7 handed the email to WordPress and WordPress accepted it. The problem is after the site: the From address, DNS authentication, or the spam folder.
- Red. WordPress refused to send. The server’s mail function is disabled or limited, or the SMTP connection failed.
- Orange. The submission was treated as spam and no email was sent. Look at reCAPTCHA, Akismet or the disallowed-words list.
- Yellow. A field failed validation. The visitor has to correct it, so this is not a delivery problem.
Green message, no email
This is the common case, and it usually comes from the Mail tab.
The From field. Open the form, go to the Mail tab, and read the From line. It must be an address on the site’s own domain, such as wordpress@clientsite.com. If it contains [your-email], the form is sending mail that claims to come from the visitor’s address. Receiving servers reject that. Contact Form 7 flags this itself with a configuration error that says the sender address does not belong to the site domain.
Reply-To. Put the visitor’s address in the Additional headers box instead:
Reply-To: [your-email]Replies then go to the visitor, and the From address stays on your domain.
The To field. Check for typos and for mailboxes that no longer exist. You can list more than one address, separated by commas.
Authentication. If the Mail tab is correct, check the domain’s DNS records with the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checker. Then search the recipient’s spam folder for the form’s subject line.
Red message
WordPress tried to send through the web server’s mail function and failed. Install an SMTP plugin and connect it to a real mail service. Use the plugin’s test email feature to confirm the connection before you test the form again. If the site already uses SMTP, the saved password or API key may have expired.
Orange message
Contact Form 7 thinks the submission is spam. With reCAPTCHA v3, a low score blocks the email. Check that the site key and secret key match the domain, and that another plugin is not loading a second copy of reCAPTCHA. With Akismet, check that the API key is still active.
Keep a copy of every submission
Install Flamingo, the companion plugin from the same author. It saves each submission in the WordPress admin. You still need the email to work, but a failed email no longer means a lost lead.
Make sure it stays fixed
A Contact Form 7 form that works today can stop next month after a host migration, an expired SMTP credential or a DNS change, and the green message will keep showing. The general causes are covered in WordPress not sending emails: 7 causes.
Formitor supports Contact Form 7. It triggers the form’s mail send on a schedule and verifies that the notification was delivered, so you hear about a failure before the client does. The free plan covers 2 sites.