Mailbag Contact FormSetting Reply-To to the sender in a WordPress contact form
Reply-To is the header your email program uses when you press Reply. On a contact form it should hold the visitor's address, while From stays on your own domain. That way the message is trusted on the way in, and your answer goes to the customer instead of back to your website.
Why not just put the visitor in From?
Because your website isn't allowed to send email as someone else's domain. A notification “from” a Gmail address, sent by your hosting server, fails DMARC for gmail.com and is exactly what spam filters look for. Many older forms and tutorials do it anyway, which is why so many contact form emails vanish.
How the popular plugins handle it
- Contact Form 7 — add
Reply-To: [your-email]to the Additional headers box on the Mail tab. CF7's default form already does this. - WPForms, Fluent Forms, Forminator — the notification settings have a Reply-To field, and it starts empty; pick the email field's smart tag yourself.
- Mailbag Contact Form — Reply-To is set to the form's email field from the first form you create, and it's part of every template that has an email field.
Check that it worked
Send the form with an address you control, open the notification and press Reply: the reply should be addressed to the visitor's address you typed. For certainty, paste the message's source into the checker — it shows From and Reply-To side by side, and warns if Reply-To points at your own domain.
Check a notification email’s headers
This tool runs in your browser with JavaScript on; nothing you paste leaves the page.
One exception worth knowing
A form without an email field, such as a callback request that only asks for a phone number, has no address to reply to. Mailbag's Callback request template leaves Reply-To empty for that reason, rather than inventing one.
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