Mailbag Contact Form

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A GDPR consent checkbox on a WordPress contact form

A plain contact form usually doesn't need consent: answering a message someone sent you is a legitimate interest, and a short privacy notice under the form covers it. You need a consent checkbox when you want to use the data for something else — typically adding the person to a newsletter — and then you should store exactly what they agreed to.

When consent is the right basis

  • Newsletter or marketing — the classic case. The box must be unticked by default and say what the person is signing up for.
  • Passing data to a third party that isn't needed to answer the enquiry.
  • Special categories of data, such as health information on a clinic's form.

This page isn't legal advice; your situation may differ, and a data protection adviser can tell you which basis fits.

What makes consent provable

If you rely on consent, you should be able to show what the person agreed to and when. A ticked box on its own proves little if the text beside it changed last month. The record should keep the wording as it was.

How Mailbag handles it

Mailbag Contact Form has a consent box field. Its text is the label you write, and when a visitor ticks it, the entry stores that text with the date — so an entry from March shows the March wording even after you rewrite it in June. The box can be required, in which case the form isn't sent until it's ticked. The Newsletter signup template includes one, worded “Yes, send me the newsletter. I can unsubscribe at any time.”

With Mailbag Pro, a form's route to Mailchimp or another service can be set to send an entry on only when the consent box is ticked, so people who didn't agree never reach your mailing list. See Mailbag Pro.

The rest of the privacy picture

Consent is one part. Mailbag also doesn't store IP addresses by default, can delete old entries automatically, and lets WordPress' own export and erase tools find entries by email address — see personal data requests.

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