Common contact form 7 issues

Contact Form 7 is a popular WordPress plugin which allows you to easily add contact forms to your website. As great as it is, sometimes things do go wrong. Find out more about the most common Contact Form 7 problems and how to fix them.

People are not filling in the fields

If you want certain fields to be mandatory, you can do this easily by adding a * to the relevant field. See the example below:


[email* your-email]

I cannot get placeholder text to work

If you want to display the placeholder text inside a field, you should use watermark, see the example below:


[email* your-email watermark "Email address*"]

My emails are going into the spam folder

The email address used in the from field, should ideally be the same as your website address. If you are using a Gmail or Hotmail account for example, this may well get flagged as a phishing attempt and put into the spam folder.

By using an email address that is coming from the same server as your website, you can prevent this problem occurring.

Invalid mailbox syntax is used

This error relates to the to or from in the plugin settings. If you're experiencing this issue, the first thing to do is make sure your email address is in the right format.

Invalid Example:


John Smith john@example.com

The email address should be surrounded by . Multiple email addresses can be added by including a comma as a separator.

Correct Examples:


john@example.com

John Smith <john@example.com>

John Smith <john@example.com>, Jan Smith <jan@example.com>

Still doesn't work?

Make sure the email address field is a required field. This one tends to trip most people up.

My emails are sending but I am not receiving them.

Firstly, check your spam. It maybe that your emails are sending but are being marked as spam in error.

Secondly, try changing the email address to a different one - preferably one that is hosted somewhere else. For example, if you're using a hotmail email account, try Gmail. If you're using Gmail, you could try your own email@yourdomain.com

If the emails aren't coming through, regardless of what email address you're using - this suggests the issues lies with the server and not your email account.

You should check your Contact Form settings and make sure there are no errors that need fixing. If you can't see any errors, you could try sending emails via SMTP instead. There are lots of free plugins that can help you with this including WP Mail SMTP and Mailbank - You will need your mailbox settings to configure these plugins.

If this fixes your problem, horraaay. If it doesn't, I would recommend contacting your host to see if they have any special requirements.

Some hosting providers may require additional settings to be applied, in order to successfully send emails from WordPress.

For example, with GoDaddy you need to change the Email settings within your Cpanel - see the video below.

Still having troubles?

If these fixes didn't help with your problem, get in touch today and I will be happy to help you.