The past few days I was testing a contact form for one of my clients, and found that if the user entered a yahoo email in the form, the form seemed to submit okay, but the email never went through. It turns out that earlier this month, Yahoo made a change to help fight spam. They asked Google to have gmail reject any emails with a yahoo “from” email that did not come from the Yahoo servers.

Up until now, we have been able to get away with putting the user email from contact forms in the “From” email field.  Now that does not work any longer with Yahoo emails.  Soon, other email providers will probably follow suit.  To fix this, the “From” email field should contain a valid email address from the same domain as the site.  Then you can put the user email in the “Reply-to” field.

In the instructions below, I am using mycompany.com as the web site domain, and contacts@mycompany.com as the “From” email. You will need to use your own domain, and can use any valid email address on that domain.

Fast Secure Contact Form

If you are using Fast Secure Contact Form, you can read the instructions provided on the plugin site.  For your convenience, I have captured a screen shot to show you the two settings that you must change (click on the image to see a larger picture).  This is in the Email Settings on the Basic Settings tab.  If you have multiple forms, you must do this for each form.

Contact Form 7

For those of you using Contact Form 7, you need to do something similar. The email “From” field defaults to [your-name] <[your-email]>.  You need to change [your-email] to an email address on your domain, as above.  Then you can use the Additional Headers field to set the Reply-To header like this:  Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]> .  See the picture on the right for an example.

It’s a bit of work to change all our contact forms, but if this change by Yahoo and others results in less email spam, then maybe it’s worth it. Let me know if you need help implementing these changes or customizing your contact forms. For further reading, see Yahoo email anti-spoofing policy breaks mailing lists from Computerworld (referenced on the Fast Secure Contact Form site).