Question :

I have a WordPress.com-website with a Contact Form on it that is used for people to subscribe to my mailing list. I want to change the eMail-address that each filled-out form is being sent to. I managed to get the online form to send to my secondary eMail-address (or any other one), but not to the one I actually would want : the one that is my main eMail-address.

What is wrong ?

Answer :

As always, the devil is in the details…

WordPress.com has a great option to easily include a Contact Form into a webpage. Such a Contact Form can be used as an actual contact form (so you don’t have to disclose your eMail-address on your website), but it can also be used for making a Feedback Form, a Subscription Form or a Registration Form for instance.

By simply clicking the “Add Contact Form” button while typing your Page or Post, you will be shown a popup window to configure your Contact Form. There you will be shown 2 tab pages. In the “Form Builder”-tab page you can configure the Fields that the visitor should fill out (so, the questions (s)he should answer). In the “Email notifications”-tab, you can give the eMail-address that the form should be sent to, and the subject line to be used.

When that’s done, you will see the ‘Contact Form script’ displayed between square brackets ( i.e. between a “[” and a “]” ) in the Edit Page or Edit Post window of your WordPress.com Dashboard. More info on this can be found here.

So much for the general intro into using Contact Forms in WordPress.com.

Here’s the actual answer to your question :

Normally, the ‘Contact Form script’ will start with something like :

{contact-form to=’myself@provider.com’ subject=’your subject line here’}{contact-field label=…. etc. ; note that in reality the { and } will be displayed as [ and ]

…in which ‘myself@provider.com’ is the eMail-address that the filled-out from will be sent to, and ‘your subject line here’ is the prefab subject line that will be used on each of those eMails.

Now the thing is, that when the contact-form to=’myself@provider.com’ is missing, it is because this eMail-address is exactly the same as the eMail-address that is set as the default eMail-address of your WordPress.com-account. In that case, the filled-out forms will NOT be send out via eMail, they will only be visible in the Feedback (main menu) –> Feedback (sub menu) chapter in your WordPress.com-Dashboard.

Note #1 : if you input your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address into the “Email notifications”-tab page, it will not stick ; put differently : it will not be included in the ‘Contact Form script’, so no eMail will be send out !

Note #2 : even if you manually edit the ‘Contact Form script’ to include your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address, no eMail will be send out !

So, if you need the Contact Form to be send to the eMail-address that is also your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address, the only option to fix this is to change your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address…

Note #3 : your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address can be changed in your account settings, which can be found here :

– go to ‘your account name’ (top-right in your Dashboard, next to the looking glass-icon)

– then select ‘your account name’ from the pop-up window, and the “My Account”-page will open

– there, you can change ‘Email Address’ (into an eMail-address that you ar NOT using to send your Contact Forms to)

Note #4 : when changing your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address, you will get 2 eMails from WordPress.com : the first one will be sent to your ‘old’ eMail-address, asking you to reply immediately if you don’t agree with a change of your eMail-address (so do NOT reply to that one) ; and a second one will be sent shortly after that to your ‘new’ eMail-address to confirm the change of your WordPress.com-account’s eMail-address (yes, you should reply to that one to confirm)

That should fix it 😉