I have a client that wants a bunch of contact forms to send to gmail addresses. 24 different contact forms for 24 different addresses.
Gmail doesn’t want to have anything to do with a contact form submission address that doesn’t match the website’s domain. Messages don’t even appear in the Spam folder, it just doesn’t get submitted (even when WP Mail Logging plugin says the submission worked ok).
I’m pretty sure I know why Gmail doesn’t want any part of this, since I had massive spam problems at our own company and had to set up DKIM, DMARC, and SPF just to try to avoid spoofing and spam for our own emails.
Currently, the client is just using standard WP mail / php mailer. Ninja Forms and WP Forms both suggest WP Mail SMTP as a better alternative that may or may not work. Since it’s not a free plugin, I was hoping someone has experience with it. I was looking at their [documentation]) and I’m not even sure it allows use of multiple email addresses that don’t match the website. I don’t think it does.
Maybe there is some SMTP plugin that does support this kind of insanity?
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>I’m pretty sure I know why Gmail doesn’t want any part of this, since I had massive spam problems at our own company and had to set up DKIM, DMARC, and SPF just to try to avoid spoofing and spam for our own emails.
Just a side note – these security measures should always have been set up from the start. Not activating DKIM / SPF is just asking to get your domain listed for spam.
>Gmail doesn’t want to have anything to do with a contact form submission address that doesn’t match the website’s domain.
Is your contact form set up to send the mails “from” the submitter address? Ideally all your submissions should be coming from your own domain, and your site’s server has permission to send in your SPF records alongside your regular mail server if they are separate.
WP Mail SMTP’s free version works decently well in my experience. That may be worth a try.
By the way, there are free SMTP mailer plugins as well. E.g.: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/smtp-mailer/])
Keep in mind that even this does not guarantee good email deliverability when sending from a shared web hosting account. You domain’s IP address could have poor sender reputation or not be setup properly for sending email. Besides DKIM, DMARC and SPF records that are set on individual domain names, there are other things that your host need to correctly configure on the IP address, e.g. forward-confirmed reverse DNS.
Many prefer to avoid the risks and save some headache by using specialized SMTP relay services for transactional emails (Mailgun, Amazon SES, SendGrid etc), but that costs extra money.
As others have mentioned the from address should be set to the domain of the website eg [email protected] or [email protected]. The website’s server won’t be allowed to send mail with from addresses from other domains.
The from address can be set globally using the WP Mail SMTP plugin.
The reply-to value can still be set to the submitter’s email so replying to the email will go to the person who submitted the form.
Ensure the TXT spf record allows the website’s server to send mail from your domain. And you should be good to go. You won’t need to worry about setting dmarc for emails from the website.