Just One Of Those Things – Test Your Contact Forms Regularly
I was testing a client contact form recently for a new website and recalled it has been a while since I have tested mine. It is a good idea to test your contact form every other month. With last week’s WordPress update to 3.9, there have been a slew of updates to plugins. This would be a great time to make sure your contact form is still working.
Unfortunately, it turned out it was a good thing I tested my form. It was NOT working. Tests proved nothing was wrong with my form, however my email was now filtering responses in the spam filter.
Gmail Marks From You That Is To You as Spam
When your website contact form sends a filled out form submission via email, your email provider sees it as from your domain URL. If your email shares that domain, it looks like it is an email from you going to you. Many email providers will mark it as spam thinking someone is "spoofing" your email or reject it completely.
The easy fix? Send your contact form notifications to a different email address that doesn’t share your domain URL. I send my contact form submissions to my personal account.
Here is what I did – setup your form notification settings to do the following:
- From field should be an email address that shares your website domain (this avoids looking like spoofing which definitely looks like spam).
- To field should be to another email address that doesn’t share your website domain (yourname@gmail.com for example).
- Reply field should be set to the email address provided by the contact form submitter. Otherwise when you reply you are replying to yourself.
Other ways of ensuring it goes through if you need to use your same domain URL email? Contact your email host provider (Google Apps, Exchange or your webhost for POP3) and ask them to whitelist your email address. Depending on what their procedures allow and level of tech sophistication, they might be able to help. There is no question most of these are simply rejecting your email outright or putting it in the junk folder.
Need a contact form? Best in business for WordPress is Gravity Forms (affiliate link) with a lot of options for connecting to other services.
What is your favorite contact form plugin (or service)?