This troubleshooting guide shows you how to fix the “there was an error trying to send your message. please try again later” error which appears when you submit a Contact Form 7 form.
There are 2 main causes for the error:-
- You host is unable to send the submitted messages as emails.
- The submissions are being marked as spam.
You can look at the color of the error to check which of the two is the culprit.
If the error has a red border, then your host is unable to send the submitted messages as emails.
In contrast, a yellow border means that the submission was flagged as spam.
The following sections guide you on how to fix each of the two errors.
You host is unable to send the submitted messages as emails
When Contact Form 7 is unable to email you the submitted message, the error “There was an Error Trying to Send Your Message. Please Try Again Later” appears.
The first thing you should do is to check if your WordPress website can send emails. You can test this using the “WP Test Email” plugin as shown below.
If your WordPress site can not send emails, you need to contact your hosting company and ask them to enable email sending on your site.
On the other hand, if your site can send emails, then you most likely have a configuration error on your contact form. There are a couple of things that you can check.
1. Ensure that you do not have multiple email addresses in your “From” field.
For example,
In the above example, [your-email] will be replaced by the sender’s email, leaving you with 2 email addresses.
2. Do not use the sender’s email address in your “From” field.
For example,
This is because some hosts block sending emails from email addresses that do not use your website’s URL.
For example,
If your website is example.com, you should use a From email address that contains example.com. This could be an email such as [email protected] or [email protected].
The default WordPress install uses [email protected] as the default email address.
If you want to be able to reply to your form submissions, you can specify the submitter’s email address in the Additional Headers section.
3. Do not use the same email address in your “to” and “From” fields.
For example,
This is because some hosts block sending an email to the same email address as the one that is sending the email.
The best option would be to use [email protected] in the From field, and your personal admin email address in the To field.
The submissions are being marked as spam
When Contact Form 7 flags a form submission as spam, the error “There was an Error Trying to Send Your Message. Please Try Again Later” appears.
If you’ve enabled the Google reCAPTCHA contact form 7 integration, ensure that you’re using version 3 API keys.
The following video shows you how to upgrade to Google reCAPTCHA V3.
If you have any other reCAPTCHA plugins on your site, make sure that they all use Google reCAPTCHA V3.
We, however, recommend that you disable the Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA integration and instead use a dedicated WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin such as Hizzle reCAPTCHA.
This is because a dedicated reCAPTCHA plugin integrates the same reCAPTCHA version into all supported plugins, hence reducing conflicts. It also ensures that the reCAPTCHA script is only loaded once.
If updating reCAPTCHA does not work:-
- First, Install the Flamingo plugin.
- Next, submit the contact form as you normally would.
- Finally, Open your admin dashboard then click on Flamingo > Inbound Message then check the spam log. You should be able to see what is causing the submissions to be marked as spam.
Other Potential Fixes
- Update all plugins and themes.
- Try deleting then re-installing Contact Form 7.
- Temporarily disable all other plugins except Contact Form 7 to see if the error is caused by a conflict with another plugin.
Learn how to create newsletter subscription forms using Contact Form 7.
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