An automatic reply from your WordPress contact form

An autoresponder sends the visitor a confirmation that their message arrived, usually with a copy of what they wrote. It's reassuring for real customers — and it needs care, because it sends an email to whatever address was typed into the form, including an address a spammer typed.

What a good automatic reply contains

A plain subject such as “We have received your message”.
When the visitor can expect an answer, stated honestly.
A copy of what they sent, so they have a record.
No links, attachments or marketing — they make the reply look like spam and give abusers something to deliver.

The abuse problem

Because the reply goes to the address in the form, a bot can type someone else's address and use your site to send them mail. Keep the reply short and without links, keep spam protection on, and don't copy free-text fields into the subject line.

Setting it up in Mailbag

In Mailbag Contact Form the automatic reply is part of each form's settings and is switched off by default. Turn it on and choose which email field it goes to. The default text thanks the visitor and includes what they sent with {all_fields}; you can change the subject and text and use the same placeholders as the notification, such as {field:name} and {site_title}. Mailbag won't save a form whose reply has no email field to send to, and it says so instead of failing silently later.

The reply is sent after the entry is saved, like the notification, and only for entries that aren't caught as spam — so the honeypot, time trap and IP limit also decide who gets one.

Coming from Contact Form 7

CF7 calls its automatic reply “Mail (2)”. When you import a CF7 form into Mailbag, Mail (2) becomes the form's automatic reply, with its subject and text carried over.

Mailbag Contact Form is a free contact form that saves every entry before it sends anything, and shows you what happened to each email.

See what it does