This is not a drill
Have you noticed that your WordPress website has not generated any enquiry in the last few weeks? And possibly since the beginning of June? As of today, June 21st, I realised that something happened in WordPress at the beginning of June that made all Contact Forms act weird, and is preventing all messages to be delivered in WordPress. So when someone interested in your services leaves a message on your website form, they press Submit and are told “Thanks for your message”, but YOU never get that message and there is no way to recover it either. I am not even considering what would happen with your potential client, waiting for you to reply to a message that you never got!
So. Try it now. Go to your website(s) and send yourself a test email. If it lands in your inbox, you can stop reading and worrying. Apologies for having wasted your time. If it does not land, you have possibly missed 3 weeks’ worth of enquiries.
If you use Gmail with your website, as I do myself, I can show you a very simple fix now. If you use another email provider, you may have to dig a bit more and find out for yourself.
So let’s start from the beginning. I am going to test this fix on one of our “UK Photographers” project websites: Cardiff Photographers
I scroll down to the bottom and fill out the form to send ourselves a test message, then click Contact Us:
After submitting the message, I get the blue rectangle under the “Contact Us” button telling me all went well. However, that message never reached my inbox!
Here is how to fix messages failing to be delivered in WordPress:
- Open the backend of that website, and go to Plugins > Add New. Search for Post SMTP.
- Click Install Now, then Activate. When the Plugin opens, you are invited to sign up for their newsletter, you can Accept and continue or Skip. You are then greeted by the plugin’s interface which looks a bit like this:
- Under Configuration, click Start the Wizard.
- Fill out the fields. in the Name field, add who is the message sent from your contact form coming from, and in the Email Address field, add the email address you want the message sent from. Click Next (Do not save the credentials if Chrome is asking you to).
- Here you must know the host that will relay the mail. For Gmail, it’s “smtp.gmail.com” but if you use a different email provider, you may have to look it up. Click Next. A connectivity test will take place, then the screen will change to this:
- Again, for Gmail, as Socket, choose “SMTP – gmail.com:465” which is the highly secured setting. For Authentication, choose “App Password”. You can click the blue link next to it to see how to do it, but I’ll show you below anyway. Click Next.
- To find your App Password, go to your Google account, click the round icon, and choose “Manage your Google Account”.
- You will see your Google account interface.
- Click Security in the left-hand sidebar, and in the Search bar, type “App passwords”:
- Click the search result that says “App passwords”. In the “Select App” drop-down list choose “Other (Custom Name)”, then type Post SMTP. Click Generate.
- The App password will be generated for you (in the yellow box). Highlight it with your mouse and copy it. Click Done and it will appear in your list of app passwords.
- Go back to the Post SMTP configuration wizard, and paste the password in the Password field. While in the Username field, type in the email address associated with the Google account you want to use (the one from which you generated the app password). Click Next.
- You will then be presented with one final screen, choose the email address on which you want to receive email delivery failure messages. I always choose the Admin email address. You can set up a Chrome extension if that is your browser. I leave it untouched. Click Next.
- And you’re done. Click Finish.
- To finish the whole exercise, the previous screen is advising you to send yourself a test email, to make sure the configuration worked. So we will do that, after seeing on the plugin interface screen that “Postman is configured”. All good.
- Now I sent myself a test message and just received it in my Gmail inbox:
So this is the end of the fix attempt, and we now can receive messages. So the fix worked. Hope you managed to fix your issues with our solution.
