WordPress. How to deal with “Your contact form has a configuration issue” error using Contact Form 7 plugin

This tutorial is going to show you how to deal with “Your contact form has a configuration issue” error using Contact Form 7 plugin in the WordPress themes.

Contact form validation

The latest Contact Form 7 plugin (version 4.4) allows you to validate your contact form for the errors. To check if your contact form has some errors:

1. Login into your WordPress admin panel.

2. Locate the following message at the top of your dashboard page: Misconfiguration leads to mail delivery failure or other troubles. Validate your contact forms now. >>Validate Contact Form 7 Configuration

3. Click the Validate Contact Form 7 Configuration link to validate your contact form.

   

4. Open the Contact > Contact forms page in site admin panel to see the errors.

5. You will see contact forms available there. Each contact form might have the validation errors next to the form title. Let’s take a closer look to the errors you could get.

This field has syntax errors

The error looks like:

The To:, From:, Subject: and Additional Headers: fields in the Mail section could have the syntax error message. If you don’t add valid information to the To: or From: fields, your email is most likely to be rejected or not arrive.

As to this error:

1. Make sure you added valid email address to the To: field under the Mail tab in your contact form. E.g.,

   To: valid-email-address@your-domain.com

2. Use correct email syntax in the From: field to send an email to the form user

   From: [your name] <[your email]>

3. Subject field adds extra info to ensure you still have a valid Subject when user does not supply a value:

   Subject: Site Name - [your subject]

4. Your contact form could have additional fields, such as phone, city, etc. In order to add the additional fields to emails you need to add content as follows:

   Additional Headers: Phone: [phone]

This email address does not belong to the same domain as the site.

If the email address added to the From: field does not belong to your host, most likely you will not receive emails sent from your site contact form or email will be rejected as a spam by the host.

Make sure you host your site on the server that allows any email to be used as the From: email. Many hostings do not allow this because of the spam that could be send on the server. You have two ways for resolving this:

1. Use a valid email address on the domain where your form is hosted. And add your content below, to the Additional Headers section

   Reply-to: [your name] <[your email]>

   It allows you to use Reply in your email application to reply to the form user’s email address.

2. You can use noreply@yourdomain.com email in your contact form field (where yourdomain.com is your domain name). From: field in this case will be:

   From: [your name] <[noreply@yourdomain.com]>

This field can be empty depending on user input

This field can be empty depending on user input can be empty in case your contact does not have some Additional Headers: or Subject:. You can leave those fields empty in case you do not need to use them for your contact form. If you get this error message in To:, From: or Message: fields , add the required content to those fields under the Mail tab in your contact form. Empty To:, From: and Message: fields will cause the “Failed to send your message. Please try again later or contact the administrator by another method.” message after the contact form submitting. You will not get messages sent from your site contact form in this case.

Here is how the error looks like:

Feel free to check our video tutorial below: