Contact Forms Stopped Working

Expected behavior

Submitting a message via a Contact Form should send an email to me.

Current behavior

Email causes a bounce from MailChannels that handles the SMTP for the hosting company. I noticed this when creating a new site. Checked my other sites and it fails on them too.

This has probably been happening for a year and I haven’t noticed.

It does not happen with WordPress sites that have the same form and settings.

Possible solution

This is the reply I got from MailChannels support:

After looking over and confirming the account “[email protected]” logs, I discovered that emails from the account are being blocked with the error code “CS”. When there are any spam patterns in the mail content, this occurs.

On further checking, I noticed that some emails are blocked due to the mail having multiple unique headers (Content-Type), which can break the RFC. This caused the mail to get blocked. In this case, we recommend avoiding repeated unique headers in the mail to prevent similar false-positive cases in the future.

Apart from that meaning nothing to me, it doesn’t explain why it only affects CP. Since the problem didn’t occur a year ago, maybe something in a CP update is causing the failure.

Steps to reproduce

Fill out a Contact Form and click Submit.

Receive screen message saying form sent.

Wait for email, which doesn’t arrive.

Context

Sending a test email from my SMTP plugin works fine. It only affects forms. Tried several different ones, but they all failed.

I have had to create new contact pages telling visitors to simply email me at a certain address.

That is odd.

I use WP Mail SMTP and Ninja Forms with reCAPTCHA v3 on most of my CP sites, they seem to work and test emails do come through.

Yes, it seems to be a MailChannels problem. Something has changed in CP that triggers a block.

I think it’s more likely that MailChannels thinks anything from CP is spam, and that this is because of a change at MailChannels.

Quite possibly

Uninstalled my SMTP plugin and the form worked. Probably don’t need SMTP, so will just use builtin PHP Mailer.

I installed WP Mail SMTP and it worked. The one I was using must have been no good.

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