How do I reply to people who have sent messages using a contact form?

When a visitor uses a contact form to send you a message through your website, the email you receive will show as coming from 'no-reply@example.com' where example.com is you website address. This means you can't just click reply to respond to the message.

The reason this is the default behaviour for a contact form is because you might not need or want to request an email address from your visitors.

However, if you want to be able to reply directly to the emails that you receive, you can configure the form to work like this by ensuring your form has both a 'Name' field and an 'Email' field type. To make sure all the emails can be replied to you'll then want to make both fields required.

There is one important caveat to this approach however. Sometimes your email server might reject emails that have the 'from' value set to an email address that isn't authorised to send emails in a certain way. In this case, the message might not even get through to you at all. The could also happen if the user enters an incorrect email address.