TL;DR – try removing reCaptcha and testing… there could be something amiss causing reCaptcha to give some indication that the submission is spam.
My steps to create/fix the problem:
[sitename].com was live on another host.
Within Bluehost Pro Shared account:
- Developed WP site on [sitename].dev.[hosting].com
- Installed Contact Form 7
- Integrated Akismet
- Integrated reCaptcha
When ready to deploy live:
- Set [sitename].com as addon domain within bluehost to [subdomain].dev.[hosting].com
- Set [sitename].com name servers to Bluehost (ns1.bluehost.com, ns2.bluehost.com)
- Once [sitename].com resolved to [sitename].dev.[hosting].com, I updated WP address (URL) settings (changed to sitename.com)
Tested contact form – received error indicating not sent (“There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later.”)
- Set up website@[sitename].com within Bluehost’s email management tools.
- Verified sending from address (in contact form settings) was now website@[sitename].com
- Installed WP-Easy-SMTP, configured to use website@sitename.com via ssl; wp-easy-smtp sends a test without issue.
Contact form still showing above error. Eventually identified that the form was failing because it was identified as spam. (I later found that the orange box around the message was a way to tell if it was spam – in my case, I just updated the warning message text.)
- Removed the reCaptcha setting and the Contact Form was able to send mail.
- Regenerated with the [sitename].com at the top of the allowed sites list, reimplemented reCaptcha and the form still works.
Hope this helps someone!