I recently had an issue with a new WordPress install, where the Contact Form wasn’t sending correctly, instead hitting the Submit button would simply show the Spinning arrows animation, with no Mail Sent.

I was also using the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin, which may have had a bearing on the issue too.

After doing some digging around I found a couple of forum posts which helped;

http://venugopalphp.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/contact-form-7-really-simple-captcha-permission/
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/13367/how-to-resolve-failed-to-send-your-message-problem-for-contact-form-7

Combining these two gave me a solution which worked;

1. Set the Permissions of the “wp-content/uploads” directory to 777
2. Open the “p-content/plugin/really-simple-captcha/really-simple-captcha.php”

   Change;

           /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */
           $this->img_type = 'png';
   
           /* Mode of temporary image files */
           $this->file_mode = 0444;
   
           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */
           $this->answer_file_mode = 0440;

   To;

           /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */
           $this->img_type = 'png';
   
           /* Mode of temporary image files */
           $this->file_mode = 0777;
   
           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */
           $this->answer_file_mode = 0770;

3. Install the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin and configure it to use your website’s email address smtp settings etc
4. Modify your Contact-Form-7 Contact Form settings;

   Change;

   

   To;

   

   Where you should replace “[email protected]” with the email address you have configured in the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin.

   Adding the Additional Headers, allows you to still reply to the original sender.