Setting up a WordPress web form on GoDaddy to send to email on Office 365 based environment

4 years ago

If you have a WordPress site hosted on GoDaddy with a web form setup to send email to an email account on Office 365 then it’s highly likely you’ve encountered problems receiving the email. By doing a quick Google search you’ll discover the reason for this boils down to GoDaddy’s strict security protocol that blocks a whole range of ports from sending email in order to combat spam.

Add to that, Office 365, or more specifically Exchange, can be a little overzealous in policing spam and other ‘unwanted’ email.

So, what follows is a step by step guide that I’ve put together to setting up a web form on WordPress that sends form submissions to an Office 365 email address.

For web forms, I would recommend WPForms as it works well in this instance.

If you have any questions or require any support on this, or for anything web or WordPress related, by all means email us.

WordPress – install Easy WP SMTP

  1. Go to Plugins and install and activate Easy WP SMTP
  2. Go to Settings > Easy WP SMTP and setup as follows:
    SMTP Host – localhost
    Type of Encryption – None
    SMTP Port – 25
    SMTP Authentication – No
    Then enter the Office 365 email and password

cPanel

  1. Under Domains go to Zone Editor
  2. Find the domain and under Actions click on Manage
  3. Edit the existing record and enter ‘0’ in Priority and enter the address in Destination which will be in the following format (or similar) yourdomain-com.mail.protection.outlook.com

Office 365

For this next step use Chrome or Safari (not Firefox as it doesn’t allow you to save the policy for some reason)

  1. Go to https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/ and login with the email and password
  2. Go to Protection > spam filter
  3. Click the ‘+’ icon to open the Spam Filter Policy pop-up
  4. Give it a suitable name e.g. ‘Spam filter’ and a description e.g. ‘tell MS Exchange to allows messages from this website’s contact form’
  5. Scroll down to allow lists > allowed domain and enter the domain of your website e.g. yourdomain.com
  6. Scroll down to advanced options > Test Mode Options and select None
  7. Scroll down to Applied To and select The recipient domain is and select the domain in the pop-up and then click on OK
  8. Finally click on Save