[Dustin MParticipant]

Hello, I’ve used Contact Form 7 in the past with little issues. However, it’s not working with this theme. I’ve not changed any settings, have reinstalled the plugin and it says,

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

[SupportMember]

Hi Dustin,

The “Failed to send your error message” error arises because the web server, Apache or IIS, has not ben configured to send out mail.

So we needed an alternative way to send out mail (SMTP) from WordPress.

Use WP Mail SMTP Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

You’ll need to download and active this plugin, then set it up with the relevant email address, that you use along with the outgoing mail server name, username and password.

Configure this plugin the way you would setup a new account under Outlook.

The plugin even alows you to send a test mail so you’ll know when all the details have been entered correctly.

Once your WordPress installation can send out SMTP mail you’ll need to alter the Contact Form 7 form templates slightly to accomodate the new method of sending mails.

In the From: field, enter the same email address that you have used to configure the WP Mail SMTP plugin.

This sets the senders email address on the outgoing email message. You may have it setup with an info@ or webmaster@ address.

So that you can easily reply to customers submitting the forms, you need to add the following line in to the Additional Headers field.

Reply-To: [your-email]

Making sure to replace the field name ‘your-email’ with whatever field name you are using to gather the email address on the form.

This sets the reply address on the outgoing email message. When you click on reply in your inbox your message will be sent to the email address that was entered in the form and not the one used to send out the email which you configured in the WP Mail SMTP plugin.

Hit the save button on the form, refresh your front-end contact form and try sending again.

You should now get the “Your message was sent successfully. Thanks.”

Note: It may take a little longer for the email to arrive in your inbox as it is being routed through an additional step. Give it a minute or so then check your inbox.

HTML option Note: If you have the “Use HTML content type” checked, remember to remove the < and > characters from the default ‘<[your-email]>’ line that’s created otherwise it will look like the email address is missing from your incoming HTML messages. The email client will try to render the address as an HTML tag because it’s included within the < and >.

Thanks

[Dustin MParticipant]

Thanks for the response. I actually went with Jetpack. It took a total of about 3 minutes to setup and works perfect.

[SupportMember]

Hi Dustin,

Glad that you figured it out.

Thanks

[lovecitychurchParticipant]

I’m having the same issue with this, however I’ve set up the additional plugin with no luck. I sent a test email without filling it out and it worked. Then added the email I wanted to use and it didn’t work. all information is correct. any insight on this?

[RupokMember]

Hi @lovecitychurch

Thanks for updating the thread but it’s pretty old so it might not be helpful for you. Are you using Contact Form 7? First follow the documentation and from here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/

If you still face any issue, kindly open a new thread and clarify your issue properly.

Cheers!

[Author]

Posts