Failed to send your message Contact Form 7

I was working on a WordPress blog recently and building a custom contact form using one of my favorite form builder plugins, Contact Form 7 when I encountered the following error every time I went to submit the form. The error was “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method”. It was enclosed in a RED box. Well, since I was the administrator I really couldn’t call him or her now could I?

I’ll admit, this one puzzled me for a little while. I have maintained other blogs and never had a problem with Contact Form 7. After searching the Internet I found this was a common problem that many folks have run into. The most common fix was to make sure that the FROM: address matches the domain of your blog site. If your blog website site is xyz.com, then the FROM: address should be something@xyz.com. However, that did not work for me. I had to also make sure that the To: address matched the domain of my blog. That worked!

Example of Contact Form 7 configuration (Bad)

Example of Contact Form 7 configuration (Good)

If you’ve tried the steps above and got your Contact Form to work, then you’re good to go. If you want to know how I troubleshot the problem, keep reading. I used a really nice WordPress plugin called WP Mail SMTP. I’m not using this plugin to send email but I did use it to “test” the sending of my contact form.

I used WP Mail SMTP to send a test email to my Gmail account. This was the original email I had set up in the To: field in my Contact Form.

When I pressed Send Test, I received the SMTP log below. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you’ll noticed the errors that prevented the Contact Form 7 from sending the form successfully.

The SMTP debugging output is shown below:
CLIENT -> SMTP: MAIL FROM:
SMTP -> get_lines(): $data was “”SMTP -> get_lines(): $str is “250 OK Sender ok
“SMTP -> get_lines(): $data is “250 OK Sender ok
“SMTP -> FROM SERVER:250 OK Sender ok
CLIENT -> SMTP: RCPT TO:
SMTP -> get_lines(): $data was “”SMTP -> get_lines(): $str is “550 No such user here
“SMTP -> get_lines(): $data is “550 No such user here
“SMTP -> FROM SERVER:550 No such user here
SMTP -> ERROR: RCPT TO command failed: 550 No such user here

I noticed that my issue had nothing to do with the FROM: address but instead, it was receiving and 550 – No such user error for the RCPT To: address (highlighted above).

So, I changed the To: address to send to an email address in the same domain as my From: address and did Send Test.

Now notice the SMTP log below after scrolling to the bottom, you’ll see the test was successful.

The SMTP debugging output is shown below:
CLIENT -> SMTP: To: contact@georgealmeida.com
CLIENT -> SMTP: From: wordpress@georgealmeida.com
CLIENT -> SMTP: Subject: WP Mail SMTP: Test mail to contact@georgealmeida.com
CLIENT -> SMTP: Message-ID: <4cbeeab24280fd41e88aab82138b7d1c@gccgl.com>
CLIENT -> SMTP: X-Priority: 3
CLIENT -> SMTP: X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.7 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/)
CLIENT -> SMTP: MIME-Version: 1.0
CLIENT -> SMTP: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
CLIENT -> SMTP: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
CLIENT -> SMTP:
CLIENT -> SMTP: This is a test email generated by the WP Mail SMTP WordPress plugin.
CLIENT -> SMTP:
CLIENT -> SMTP:
SMTP -> get_lines(): $data was “”SMTP -> get_lines(): $str is “250 OK
“SMTP -> get_lines(): $data is “250 OK
“SMTP -> FROM SERVER:250 OK
CLIENT -> SMTP: QUIT