Often businesses start with basic (free) contact form and then upgrade to paid services as needed. As the business grows they may have other reasons for paid upgrades, such as the ability to create surveys for marketing research.

The paid upgrades are certainly nice. They improve message delivery, make it less likely for messages to end up in spam, store contacts and messages as a backup, integrate with other powerful tools, add conditional logic, and much more.

Some of the upgrades are especially necessary if you have an ecommerce site or other special upgrades for WordPress.

Conditional logic would be something like “Are you in the US”, yes or no? If they say “yes” then a new field appears and they are asked an additional seperate question that would not be asked if they said “no”. There are plenty of marketing, sales and operational cases for this. The contact form on this site has conditional logic based on who is sending the message.

Maintaining a backup of contact form submissions ensures that you’ll get the messages from your contact forms even if they fail to deliver to your email inbox. This feature is usually creating the backup on your WordPress installation.

There are two ways. They can both stop it from happening but work best when done together.

The first is to mark the message as “not spam” and move it to the inbox, even if you’ve read it. This helps your email software learn to recognize those messages as safe.

The second is email authentication, which adds DMARC, DKIM and SPF to the marketing alphabet soup.

DMARC, DKIM and SPF are three different methods of email authentication. They not only improve the deliverability of branded emails (you@yourdomain.com), but they also prevent third parties from trying to use your domain name to create fake emails for spam and phising schemes. (Spam is any unwanted form of communication. Phising is when a malicious sender is pretending to be someone they are not in order to gather information. For example, they might pretend they are your business and ask your customers for their login).

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. It tells a receiving email server what to do with a message if it does not pass DKIM and SPF.

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It is an encrypted signature that verifies that an email did indeed come from it’s associated domain (the yourdomain.com part of you@yourdomain.com, its a technical signature, not a human signature you’d find at the end of a message)

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It is a list of servers (read by machines, not humans) that indicate where branded emails are sent from.

Mirex Marketing can set these up for you as part of the Websmaster Service. Its usually done at the same time we are setting up SMTP when needed.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, it’s a fancy way of saying we are routing the email through a reliable email processor instead of through your hosting provider.

This is possible but we don’t suggest it. It can use up your hosting resources/bandwidth and bog down your WordPress installation with files that are not directly for your website. If you decide that you need it, then we’d impose a file size limit, specify allowed file types for security issues, and try to route the upload to a Google Drive or other cloud storage that is not your website.