Contact Form X vs SMTP URI and logging

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! 🙂

Using SMTP protocol to transfer emails ensures solid operations. It is very easy to set up SMTP. You can find the settings for this plugin at the bottom of WordPress admin menu Options / General. You should get your SMTP settings from your ISP, hosting provider, webmaster, email provider etc. Using every option SMTP URI formally looks like this: smtpTLS://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT Thus encryption type and :// and user name and : and password and @ and mail server name and : and port number. All except encryption type and mail server (host name) are optional. SMTP encryption types are as follows: For encrypted connection (STARTTLS on submission port) start your SMTP URI with smtpTLS:// – the default port is 587. For fully SSL encrypted connection (SMTPS) start it with smtps:// – the default port is 465. For unencrypted connection (plain SMTP) start it with smtp:// – the default port is 25. This is not recommended for non-local servers. WARNING! Use URL-encoded strings. You can find the settings for this plugin at the bottom of WordPress admin Options / General. You may define your SMTP URI also in wp-config.php: define( 'SMTP_URI', 'smtpTLS://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT' ); To set From: name and From: address use WP Mail From II plugin. SMTP error logging SMTP communication errors are logged in PHP error.log and – if Sucuri Scanner plugin is available – are sent to Sucuri and can be viewed in its Alert Logs panel. Adding automatic Bcc: address An automatic Bcc: address can be set by adding path to SMTP URI: /admin_email. SMTP debugging Add query string to SMTP URI: ?debug. Debug level can be set by adding a value: ?debug=4, possible values: 0,1,2,4 TODO Option to skip newsletters: ALO Newsletter, Newsletter, Mailpoet. Video on installing and setting up this plugin. Remove smtp_uri option on uninstallation (I hope you won’t uninstall it) Usage examples Unauthenticated local SMTP server on port 25 smtp://localhost Unauthenticated local SMTP server on submission port smtpTLS://localhost Authenticated connection to localhost on port 25 smtp://john.doe:Secretpwd1@localhost “@” sign in the username, a Gmail example smtps://your.address%40gmail.com:[email protected] Sendgrid example smtpTLS://CREDENTIAL-USERNAME:[email protected] Mandrill example smtpTLS://REGISTERED%40EMAIL:[email protected] Unauthenticated SMTP server on a custom port smtpTLS://mail.server.net:2525 Development goes on on GitHub.