Running WP for several years, no problems running Contact Form 7 as a plugin. My host, Dreamhost, and a few others I’ve checked out, including bluehost.com, have started to implement anti-spam policies that basically prohibit the spoofing of an email address in a contact form.

A visitor to a site fills out Name / Email on the form, the email in my inbox says it’s from the visitor, even though it’s been sent through my web host.

Dreamhost tech support solution to this is to change the From email in Contact Form 7 to be an email address associated with a domain name hosted with them. That works and everything is fine, but not in practical application.

When I receive this email and hit reply, it has MY email address in the To address box, not the person who sent me the email. I must then copy / paste their email from the body of the email to the To section.

Is there any workaround to this? Someone has suggested there is some editing to the code that would be a viable workaround. Dreamhost and WordPress forums have become littered with people who are now in the same boat, most are assuming something is wrong w/ the newest release of WP and / or the plugin, when the actual "problem" is the new policy with the host. I’d like emails to show up in my inbox via the form (preferably Contact Form 7 plugin) to be from the person filling them out, so replying is seamless, just like it’s been up until this new policy change.

I have not ran into that problem with hostgator, so I have not had to look into a solution, sorry

I mean, if you have mac mail or any email client worth it’s weight it should auto-link their email, and you just click the direct link to their email in the email you receive.

As a possible workaround you could do a php solution where, in the message that it sends YOU, it only includes a link that says "reply to message". Inside this anchor link you use the valid syntax to populate an email. for example this is valid:

<a href="mailto:
/* */
?subject=Hi my name is tom&body=this is my full reply">Reply to poster</a>. Obviously the href="" paramaters that I specified need to be URL encoded but thats easy. From there, you can construct a custom email based on this.

Inside contact form 7 thats still probably even doable, except for perhaps the URL encode part (although most email programs are pretty smart).

In the message body it sends you you could say

<a href="mailto:[my-email]?subject=[my-subject]&body=[my-body]">Reply to sender</a> and that will allow you to pre-populate your reply when you click on the reply link

PS Your host is a fucking piece of shit if they care about that. What the fuck? Go to liquidweb.com and signup. fuck dream host.

I ended up moving to asmallorange.com, for this reason plus several others. After 8 years with dreamhost their customer service has gone to shit. One of my clients who also hosts with them has been down since Thursday due to a failed hardware "upgrade"