How do I make a Contact Form?
Easy! Put
[contact-form]
in any post or page, and a simple contact form asking for the sender’s name, email address, website and comment will be inserted. When someone submits a message through the form, you receive that message in an email.
Your email address is never shown, and the sender never learns it (unless you reply to the email!).
What about spam? Will I get a lot from the contact form?
You may get some spam, but you shouldn’t get a lot. All the messages people send to you through the contact form are filtered through Akismet.
You can put whatever you want in the name and email boxes. How can I know who’s really sending the message?
If a logged in WordPress.com member sends you a message, the end of the email will let you know that the message was sent by a verified user, and you can trust the name and email. Otherwise, you can’t trust anything.
As with anything online, know that anonymity is both a curse and a blessing :)
Can I use the form in a text widget in the sidebar?
No, but you can create a contact form on a page and link to it instead.
Can I change how the form looks?
Nope, not unless you have Custom CSS. You can, of course, include any text you want above or below the contact form.
Can I have a message like “Thanks for your email, I’ll be sure to read it”?
No. As far as the sender is concerned, the contact form is a big black hole.
My blog has multiple authors. Who gets the email?
The email is sent to the author of the post with the contact form in it. So each author on your blog can have his or her own contact form. But … each author can create a contact page of their own. So you could have a text widget which links to the author’s contact page, or at the bottom of each post add something like “Please contact me here if you wish”. Because you can send yourself emails this way do test to be sure for yourself.
Great! But how will my visitors know who they’re sending a message to?
Just make the title of your post “Contact Mary” or put “Hey, drop John a line with the form below” in the body of your post.
Is there a list in blog admin of who has sent messages?
Your email client already does such a good job of that, so WordPress.com does not bother to keep a list.
Can I find out which authors on my blog are being sent emails?
Sure, just ask them! We don’t want to get all big brother on you or your blog, so we can’t tell you (no really - we actually don’t know!).
Can I have a copy of emails sent? / Can the emails go to multiple people?
We don’t do anything fancy like that; we can only send messages to the one email address: the post author’s. If you want to set up something clever in your email client, that’s up to you.
Do I have stats for this?
Nope. Again, we just don’t keep track of these things.
