Sunday 14 September 2014

Retrieve back lost emails in Contact Form 7 Wordpress plugin

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Make Contact Form send emails and recover those that were .... lost ....


Note: This write up is for users of wordpress plugin Contact Form 7, who are looking to retrieve back their lost emails that did not send out from their website. The aim is not to tackle how to make the plugin send emails to your desired account successfully which have already been tackled in many other blogs. 

Recently I had a client using the popular wordpress plugin Contact Form 7. His complaint was that he has not been receiving emails from the form for quite a while. And this has been happening for a couple of months. Since this form was a source of business revenue, it sure was not only an important problem so to speak, but an expensive one as well.

Investigating, I dived into the plugin settings. First i tested it with a neutral email recipient like gmail. That seemed to work. Setting it back to our domain's email address or my clients' preferred account however just did not receive anything. Something was fishy.

Contacting the hosting provider gave some clues on what was happening. Apparently some user on our shared hosting plan was sending out spam, causing the whole mail server to get on the spam blacklist. How come we get penalized for this i'm really not sure. I thought they were supposed to take care and prevent such problems...

As you know, waiting for them to react and rectify usually takes time. I had to fix it now.
Setting wordpress to use an external smtp server did the trick.

The lost business opportunities however kept bugging me. After-all this form was for potential business clients to express interest, so it meant money.

I searched for the email logs, they had to be somewhere.
Searching high and low, and I finally found them.

Go to Cpanel -> File Manager.
In the root folder, look for Mail folder -> New.
Hope you find something here, because i found several of the "lost" emails, together with mentions of error and rejection messages. Ouch...

Find Email Logs in Cpanel







Overview of my attempts:
1. Tried to set Contact Form 7 to send forms to my Gmail account. (works)

2. Tried to set Contact Form 7 to send forms to host domain email address, which is the domain where wordpress was installed. (dosen't work)

3. Contacted the hosting provider. (was told that because i was on a shared hosting plan, the mail ip was blacklisted due to some spammer)

4. I set wordpress to send email from my specified smtp server. (finally it works)

5. Put in place some anti spam measures.

6. And now that settles things for the time being. But the lost business kept haunting me.
Went to dig for Cpanel email logs.

7. Found them in Root - > Mail - > New

Useful links for those with email problems:
http://buzztone.com.au/contact-form-7-email-issues/#spam
http://contactform7.com/faq/

Disclaimer: Due to the multiple factors that can cause email problems, the solution presented here is meant to be an avenue of possible help, and cannot promise more than this. Feel free to post comments/questions though.

Sunday 7 September 2014

Find out who is using my Wordpress theme

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Recently I needed to find out how other websites were also using my Wordpress theme of choice. I did not seem to find many tools out there to accomplish this. So i developed one here. This is still in prototype.