SMTP for Contact From 7

WordPress uses PHPMailer to send mail from with your local mail server, but it can happen that your mail were not accepted by mail providers…
This can happen for several reasons, sometimes because the mail server is not configured or sometimes because the records DKIM, DMARC and SPF of the domain been set up correctly and so on…
Anyway you can avoid any problems by using an external SMTP server and sending mail with it!

Additional features

• ✅ Live testing: a module for testing e-mail settings with the Rest-Api (that avoid to reload the page for this kind of test). The entire output of the php mailer will be captured, which will be useful in case of configuration errors or the wrong parameter when is possible.
• ✅ Customised template: wrap cf7 emails with a template, so your emails will have a less textual and a little prettier format! The template can be customised for each form and internationalized.
• ✅ Automated Reports: choose when and what email you want to receive the report and I will send you a summary of sent and failed emails

This plugin is ads free and I don’t want to try to sell you any pro version! If you want to contribute, there are many ways to do so, from simple suggestions and bug reports to translating and contributing code. See below how to do it!

SMTP

SMTP stands for ‘Simple Mail Transfer Protocol’. It is a connection-oriented, text-based network protocol of the Internet protocol family and as such is on the seventh layer of the ISO/OSI model, the application layer.
Like any other network protocol, it contains the rules for proper communication between networked computers. SMTP is specifically responsible for sending and forwarding e-mails from a sender to a recipient.
Since its release in 1982 as the successor to the ‘Mail Box Protocol’ in Arpanet, SMTP has become the standard protocol for sending e-mails. However, the SMTP procedure remains largely invisible to the normal consumer, as it is executed in the background by the e-mail programme used.
Only if the software, the webmail application on the browser or the mobile e-mail application does not automatically determine the SMTP protocol when creating an account, does it have to be set manually to ensure smooth e-mail traffic.

SMTP presets

1. Aruba
2. Gmail (tls and ssl)
3. Yahoo (tls and ssl)
4. Outlook (tls and ssl)
5. Office365 (tls)

Would you like to find more presets (that you think are useful to other users)? Open a request in the support form and provide the necessary connection data (auth, server address and port). In the next cf7-smtp version you will find the required configuration among the presets.

Security

it’s warmly advised to store at least the password into config.php as a constant. And in addition, it’s also very easy! It needs only to add

define( 'CF7_SMTP_USER_PASS', 'mySecr3tp4ssWord' ); 

into your config.php just before

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */ 

All passwords will be stored encrypted, but still it is not good practice to put it into database!

Quick setup

as with the user password other constants can also be defined. Available constant are CF7_SMTP_HOST, CF7_SMTP_PORT, CF7_SMTP_AUTH, CF7_SMTP_USER_NAME, CF7_SMTP_USER_PASS, CF7_SMTP_FROM_MAIL, CF7_SMTP_FROM_NAME

But, to quickly set up the plugin there is one constant that wraps all the others, so in case you manage multiple websites this will be very convenient!

define( 'CF7_SMTP_SETTINGS', array( 'host' => string, 'port' => number, 'auth' => ''|'tls'|'ssl', 'user_name' => string, 'user_pass' => string, 'replyTo' => true|false, 'insecure' => true|false, 'from_mail' => email, 'from_name' => string, )); 

Template

Wouldn’t it be better to have a small container to make our mail a little prettier? Well we have it!
Furthermore, if you prefer to use your own template for mail, simply create it by following these steps:
1. Create a folder named “cf7-smtp/” in your template folder.
2. Copy what you find here into it
3. Name it default.html (or default-{{CONTACT-FORM-ID}}-{{LANGUAGE}}.html depends on your needs)
4. (Optional) You can, customize logo, website link and other template parts. checkout the filter documentation on GitHub/wiki

Support

Community support: via the support forums on wordpress.org
Bug reporting (preferred): file an issue on GitHub

Contribute

We love your input! We want to make contributing to this project as easy and transparent as possible, whether it’s:

• Reporting a bug
• Testing the plugin with different user agent and report fingerprinting failures
• Discussing the current state, features, improvements
• Submitting a fix or a new feature

We use GitHub to host code, to track issues and feature requests, as well as accept pull requests.
By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its GPLv2 License.