Contact Form X vs Gmail SMTP

Displays a user-friendly contact form that your visitors will love. CFX: Contact form reinvented. Fast and friendly. Fresh and clean. Awesome for everyone 🙂 Overview Install, activate, and then display the form anywhere, using the widget, shortcode, or template tag. Here is an overview of Contact Form X: Easy to use Simple and secure ADA and WCAG compliant Lightweight and super fast Provides multiple form styles Customize just about everything Display the contact form anywhere Add Checkbox, Radio, and Select fields Customize the order of all form fields Send email to multiple recipients Complete documentation via Help tab Excellent free plugin support 😎 “The famous spam filter SpamAssassin” scores CFX = zero spam! For more details, check out the “Screenshots” section, below. Form Fields Easily choose which fields to display in the form. Each field may be set as required, optional, or disabled. Choose from these fields: Name Website Email Subject Custom Field 1 (can be dropdown, checkbox, radio, text, or phone number) Custom Field 2 (can be dropdown, checkbox, radio, text, or phone number) Custom Field 3 (can be dropdown, checkbox, radio, text, or phone number) Challenge Question Message Google reCaptcha (v2 or v3 Invisible) Cloudflare Turnstile (Invisible Captcha) Carbon Copy Agree to Terms You can change the order of these fields and customize their labels and placeholders, everything is super flexible. For a live demo of Contact Form X, visit my support page at Plugin Planet, and also my contact page at Perishable Press. Feel free to send a test email to see how it works, I won’t mind 😉 Also check out CFX in the “Screenshots” section (below) for a better idea of how the default form is styled out of the box. Geeky Stuff Lots of goodness for the geeks among us: Built with WordPress APIs Ajax-powered form submission Remembers all form data on error Cloudflare Turnstile (Invisible Captcha) Google reCaptcha (v2 or v3 Invisible) Drag/drop ordering of all form fields View your email messages on the WP Dashboard Option to enable/disable storing of email data in database Display form via widget, shortcode, or template tag Five CSS themes: Default, Classic, Micro, Synthetic, Dark Optionally disable all plugin styles and use your own CSS Optionally collect user data like IP, host, and referrer Works perfectly with or without Gutenberg Block Editor Focused on performance, security, and usability Include extra form and user info with each message Customize the form’s success and error messages Provides plenty of useful hooks for developers Targeted loading of CSS and JavaScript assets One-click remove email data from database One-click restore default options Translation ready Contact Form X is a fresh new, lighter alternative to the heavier contact forms out there. CFX is lightweight yet fully featured. As they say, “everything you want, nothing you don’t”. Privacy To help protect user privacy, Contact Form X provides the following features: Agree to terms checkbox, customizable Choose which fields to include with the form Option to disable collection of user IP address and other data Note: this plugin uses cookies to enhance form functionality Basically, this plugin enables visitors to send a message via contact form. Any information the user enters into the form will be sent directly to the recipient(s) according to plugin settings. When enabled in the plugin settings, details about each sent message will be stored in the WordPress database. Visit the “Advanced” plugin settings to control and/or disable this and other data-collection features. Note: CFX provides an option to enable Google reCaptcha, which is provided by Google as a third-party service. For details on privacy and more, please refer to official documentation for Google reCaptcha. Contact Form X is developed and maintained by Jeff Starr, 15-year WordPress developer and book author. Support development I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can make a donation or purchase one of my books: The Tao of WordPress Digging into WordPress .htaccess made easy WordPress Themes In Depth Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins: BBQ Pro – Blazing fast WordPress firewall Blackhole Pro – Automatically block bad bots Banhammer Pro – Monitor traffic and ban the bad guys GA Google Analytics Pro – Connect WordPress to Google Analytics Head Meta Pro – Ultimate Meta Tags for WordPress REST Pro Tools – Awesome tools for managing the WP REST API Simple Ajax Chat Pro – Unlimited chat rooms USP Pro – Unlimited front-end forms Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thanks! 🙂

Gmail SMTP plugin allows you to authenticate with your Gmail account to send email via Gmail SMTP server. Most shared hosting servers have restrictions when it comes to email. Usually email will get blocked or missing for no reason. Sometimes it will get blocked when your website reaches the daily limit of outgoing email. This plugin can bypass this issue by routing the email through Gmail’s SMTP server. Gmail SMTP Add-ons Reply-To Cc Email Logger Gmail SMTP Benefits Gmail SMTP plugin is not like most SMTP plugins. It uses the OAuth 2.0 protocol to authorize access to the Gmail API – which means a more secure login system and users won’t have to enter any username or password. Gmail SMTP plugin uses PHPMailer – a very popular library used for sending email through PHP’s mail function. This libary is also used in the core WordPress to send email. Gmail SMTP plugin utilizes “wp_mail” (A function used by WordPress to send email) instead of completely overriding it. This way you still get all the benefits of the default mail function. You no longer need to enable Allow less secure apps on your gmail account to fix SMTP connection issue. This issue became prominent from December 2014, when Google started imposing XOAUTH2 authentication (based on OAuth2) to access their apps. This issue still affects almost all the SMTP plugins because they authenticate via username and password. How OAuth 2.0 Authorization Works You register an application in the Google Developers Console. The application is launched and it requests that you give it access to data in your Google account. If you consent, the application receives credentials to access the Gmail API. Gmail SMTP Features Configure your website to send email using Gmail SMTP server Authenticate using OAuth 2.0 protocol Authenticate with encryption when sending an email (TLS/SSL) Gmail SMTP Basic Setup Create a new project in Google Developers Console. Enable Gmail API in it. Create credentials (OAuth client ID) to access this API. Configure the consent screen for the web application. Enter a Product Name and a Privacy policy URL. Once the consent screen is configured, create a web application. Go to the plugin settings (Settings->Gmail SMTP). Set the Authorized Redirect URL of the application as the one shown in the settings. Finish creating the web app. Copy the newly created Client ID and Client secret and paste into the settings area. Enter your OAuth Email, From Email and From name. Select an encryption. Enter a port number. Save the settings. Now you can authorize your application to access the Gmail API by clicking on the Grant Permission button. Once the application has been authorized Gmail SMTP plugin will be able to take control of all outgoing email. Gmail SMTP Settings Authorized Redirect URI: Authorized redirect URL for your website. You need to copy this URL into your web application. Client ID: The client ID of your web application. Client secret: The client secret of your web application. OAuth Email Address: The email address that you will use for SMTP authentication. This should be the same email used in the Google Developers Console. From Email Address: The email address which will be used as the From Address when sending an email. From Name: The name which will be used as the From Name when sending an email. Type of Encryption: The encryption which will be used when sending an email (TLS/SSL. TLS is recommended). SMTP Port: The port which will be used when sending an email. If you choose TLS it should be set to 587. For SSL use port 465 instead. Disable SSL Certificate Verification: As of PHP 5.6 a warning/error will be displayed if the SSL certificate on the server is not properly configured. You can check this option to disable that default behaviour. Gmail SMTP Test Email Once you have configured the settings you can send a test email to check the functionality of the plugin. To: Email address of the recipient. Subject: Subject of the email. Message: Email body. For detailed setup instructions please visit the Gmail SMTP plugin page.