Contact Form 7 only ever tries to email you. If SMTP is down, misconfigured, or just quietly fails, the lead is gone — no record, no way to know. LeadShield saves every submission straight to your database first, so nothing depends on email arriving.
By design, Contact Form 7 sends an email and forgets. That's fine — until it isn't.
Shared hosting, expired credentials, a hosting migration — the form still says "message sent," but nothing ever arrives, and there's no record it happened.
If the notification email lands in spam, gets deleted, or the mailbox fills up, that inquiry is gone for good — with no database, no backup, nothing to check.
LeadShield hooks in before Contact Form 7 attempts delivery — so the outcome of that attempt never decides whether the lead survives.
Standard CF7 form, no changes needed on the front end.
Happens first, before any email is attempted — this step cannot fail because of SMTP.
If it fails, LeadShield automatically retries through your configured fallback provider.
See the lead in your dashboard, tagged with exactly what happened to the email.
Submit the form. Watch the same failure play out two different ways.
Every submission is saved to a dedicated table, independent of email delivery — export to CSV anytime.
A honeypot field plus keyword filtering keeps obvious bot noise out of your leads list.
Filter by form, date, or status, star important leads, and mark items read as you work through them.
Set a fallback provider once — if your primary SMTP fails, delivery is retried automatically, no lead left waiting.
Check both your primary and fallback SMTP health from the dashboard, without sending a real test lead.
Get an email the moment your primary SMTP goes down and fallback kicks in — fix it before it becomes a pattern.
"Found out three weeks in that my host had quietly changed SMTP ports. Every enquiry from that period was still sitting in the dashboard."
"I manage six client sites. This is the first thing I install on every one — one less thing to explain when a client says 'nobody's contacting me.'"
"The fallback kicked in during a hosting migration and I got the alert email before a single client noticed anything was wrong."
No — your existing CF7 mail setup stays exactly as it is. LeadShield adds a database save step that runs before that email is attempted, and (in Pro) a fallback path if it fails.
No. The Free version only needs database storage and spam screening — no third-party account required. The fallback provider (e.g. SMTP2GO) is only needed for the Pro failover feature.
Yes — no changes needed to your forms. LeadShield hooks into CF7's existing submission process automatically.
No — Pro is a one-time payment. No recurring charge, no renewal to remember.