Flo Forms Issues

The following article reviews email issues that may occur when using the Flo Forms plugin and how to solve them.

There are a number of reasons why you may not receive emails:

  • Your hosting server mail function may not be configured
  • Your email is sent to spam
  • Your email is blocked due to using the senders email address in the header
  • Emails are sent to spam
  • Hitting send button but send icon spins forever

Try the fixes below 1 by 1, and test each time to debug.

Our Flo Forms plugin

Spin Button Loads Forever

If someone tries to submit your form and you get a continuous loading icon, it could mean a few things.

  1. The contact form isn’t set up correctly
  2. Your Server doesn’t send emails
  3. WordPress mail function isn’t working
  4. You have an SMTP or other mail plugin that is not configured correctly.

Check Form Settings

Make sure that you have added your email to your contact form block, and your Flo Form plugin.

Try sending again.

Check for Email or SMTP Plugins

If it’s not working the next thing to check is if you have any plugins for SMTP or emails. If you have any of these plugins, you can de-activate or configure them. I’d suggest de-activating the plugins and trying the form.

If it’s working great, if not, it’s time to test if the WP server and if it’s sending emails.

Test Server is Sending Emails

To test if your server is configured to send emails you can install the Check Emails plugin for WordPress:

Once installed, activate.

Then go to tools > check email, and try sending an email to yourself:

If this works, great, your server is configured to send emails.

Follow the next sections to debug the issue further.

Emails may be blocked to due using a reply to header, or from going to spam.

Server Spam Block

There are 2 server side reasons you may not be receiving your clients emails, the mail function is not working with your hosting, or your hosting provider has mail filters blocking any emails being sent.

Most servers will not allow emails to be sent  from your site that appear to be from an email address that does not include your domain.

Solution

To bypass that, our plugin has the option to turn off the ‘Reply-To Header’ and it will use the default hosting (or WordPress) email.

To do so, go to your WordPress back end and then to FloForm Settings, then select no for “Enable “Reply-to” email header?”:

flo-forms-reply-to

Emails sent to spam

Go to your email and check the spam folder. Sometimes the emails go to your spam folder, and you think the form is not working. This is common for Gmail users.

To prevent this from happening, make sure to add your WordPress email to the approved senders list. It should be:

wordpress@top-level-domain.com

Just replace top-level-domain.com with your own domain. For example if your website is johndoe.com your email would be:

wordpress@johndoe.com

The following resource shows various ways to add emails to the approved senders list:

Add to approved senders list documentation

Server Mail function

On occasions its possible that the server you’re using does not have email support.

First we need to check if your server is sending emails at all.

There are 2 methods for this:

1. Test Email Plugin

For that you can create a new user using an email you have access to.

Step 1 – Add New User

Go to Users > Add New, and complete the form.

Make sure you check the option that sends password to the user:

Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 9.06.14 AM

Step 2 – Check Email

Check if  you’ve received via email the credentials for the new user (make sure you check the spam). If you did receive the credentials, then the email is working great!

Review the next section in this article Flothemes – User Email to see if your WordPress mail settings are causing the email to be blocked.

Solution

If you didn’t receive any emails, then you need to contact the hosting to see if email support is provided. Ask if the wp_mail() or PHP Mail() function is enabled for the site.

Alternatively you can use an SMTP server to send the emails. Please refer to the SMTP section for further details.

Check the next section to learn how to set up an SMTP plugin.

Setting up SMTP

We recommend using the following tutorial from WP Beginner to learn more about setting up an SMTP to send your emails using Mailgun or Gmail. You can also see individual articles below.

Gmail SMTP

Our friends over at WP Beginner have written a great article explaining how to use SMTP mail with Gmail, see the article linked below.

WP Beginner Gmail SMTP

Mailgun SMTP

The following tutorial explains how to use Mailgun for WordPress for your SMTP needs. It allows up to 10k emails a month, perfect for your photography sites contact form.

Mailgun for WordPress Tutorial