Every form tool lets you add a second recipient, and the setting takes ten seconds to find. What the settings screen does not tell you is that there are four different ways one submission can reach several people, and they behave differently the moment someone presses Reply all, leaves the company, or turns out to have a typo in their address.
Four ways to send one submission to several people
- Several addresses on the To line. One message, everyone named on it, everyone visible to everyone else.
- CC. Still one message and still visible. The only difference from To is the label, which tells people the message is not mainly for them.
- BCC. One message, but the blind copies are left off the headers everyone else sees, so nobody knows they were copied.
- Separate deliveries. Each person gets their own message, addressed to them alone.
There is also an option that lives outside the form entirely: send to one group address, such as a shared mailbox or a distribution list your mail system manages, and decide membership there. When someone joins or leaves, nobody has to touch the form.
The reply-all problem
A contact form notification has an unusual shape. Set up properly, its Reply-To is the visitor and its other recipients are your colleagues. RFC 5322 says that a reply to all recipients may copy the original To and Cc addresses alongside the person being answered, and mainstream mail clients do exactly that. So when three colleagues share a notification on the To or CC line and one of them presses Reply all to say "I'll take this one", the visitor receives your internal triage note too.
BCC only half solves it: the copied person is hidden, but if they press Reply all, their reply still goes to the visitor and to everyone on the visible lines. Separate deliveries are the clean version. Each copy carries the visitor in Reply-To and nobody else, so Reply and Reply all both reach the visitor alone, and the conversation about who handles it happens somewhere internal.
Privacy, and what happens when one address is wrong
Shared messages also share everything else. Every visible recipient learns every other visible address, which is harmless inside a team and less so when an agency copies a client, or a client copies a contractor. And when one message goes to five people and one address is mistyped, what you see depends on the sender: usually the other four receive it and a bounce comes back for the fifth, sometimes to a mailbox nobody reads. With separate deliveries, each person's copy succeeds or fails on its own record, and one bad address cannot be confused with the others.
Contact Form 7, and other WordPress forms
Contact Form 7 builds its notification on the form's Mail tab. Several recipients go in the To field separated by commas (its documentation on mailbox syntax: "If you have multiple mailboxes, use a comma (",") as a separator"), and copies go in the Additional headers field as Cc: and Bcc: lines, one header per line:
To: sales@yourcompany.com, ops@yourcompany.com
Additional headers: Reply-To: [your-email]
Cc: manager@yourcompany.com
Bcc: archive@yourcompany.comEither way it is one message, with everything above about Reply all. Mail (2) looks like a way to send a separate copy, but it is a second template usually used as an auto-reply to the visitor, and Contact Form 7 sends it only when the primary mail went out successfully, so it cannot fail independently. Contact Form 7 also keeps no copy of submissions itself; Flamingo, a separate plugin by the same author, does. Elsewhere in WordPress, Divi's Contact Form module takes a comma-separated list in its Email Address field, and Elementor's form widget has Cc and Bcc fields beside To. All of them send through WordPress's own mail function, so the deliverability advice for one applies to all.
Squarespace
Squarespace's form block sends to one address per form. Its help centre puts it plainly: "Each form can only have one email address connected", and by default that is the account email of whoever added the block. To reach several people from the built-in block, make that one address a group or forwarding address in your own mail system, so the fan-out happens there. The block also keeps submissions on the site (until you delete them when the form has a required email field, for 30 days when it does not), which is the record to check when a message seems to be missing. Notifications arrive from form-submission@squarespace.info, so that is the sender your inbox rules need to allow. The other route is a code block holding a plain HTML form that posts to a form backend; note that Squarespace allows JavaScript in a code block only on its Core, Plus and Advanced plans.
How WebForms does it
WebForms is built around one submission going to several places, so all four shapes are available, along with one that inbox-only form tools tend to leave out: sending to different people depending on what the visitor entered.
Several recipients on one email destination
An email destination takes several To addresses (up to 5 on Pro, up to 10 on Agency) and, on both paid plans, CC and BCC. It goes out as one message, so everything above about Reply all applies. Before it is sent, any address we have stopped emailing (because it bounced) or whose domain cannot receive mail is left off; the others still get the message, and the delivery only fails if no To address is left. One quirk worth knowing: the message carries a single one-click unsubscribe link, and it belongs to the first address on the To line, so a colleague on CC who uses it removes that person, not themselves.
Separate deliveries: one destination per person
Add a second email destination and each one gets its own message and its own row in the form's delivery log, with its own status and error. With a _replyto field in the form, every copy carries the visitor in Reply-To and no other recipient, which is the clean reply-all behaviour described above. One person's full mailbox has no effect on anyone else's copy. Each email is attempted once and never retried, so the log is the record of what happened. Slack, Discord, Telegram and webhook destinations do retry with backoff, which makes one of them a sensible second destination for enquiries you cannot afford to miss.
Different people for different answers
Routing rules, on Pro and Agency, decide which destinations receive a submission from its field values. Put the choice in the form, where the visitor makes it, and use a field with fixed options rather than free text:
<form action="https://send.webforms.to/wft_your_key" method="POST">
<select name="topic" required>
<option value="sales">A new project</option>
<option value="support">Help with an existing site</option>
<option value="billing">An invoice</option>
</select>
<input type="email" name="email" required>
<textarea name="message" required></textarea>
<button>Send</button>
</form>Then one rule per answer, each pointing at its own email destination:
1. topic is sales -> sales@yourcompany.com (stop here) 2. topic is support -> support@yourcompany.com (stop here) 3. topic is billing -> accounts@yourcompany.com (stop here) Default -> hello@yourcompany.com
Rules are checked from the top, and a submission goes to the destinations of every rule it matches, so "stop here" is the switch that matters. With it, a sales enquiry goes to sales and nowhere else, and the default rule at the bottom only sees what nothing above it took. Without it, a matching submission carries on down the list and reaches the default as well, which is what you want for "also post big budgets to Slack" and not what you want for "send invoices to accounts instead". The default rule cannot be deleted, so a submission that matches nothing is still delivered somewhere, and a destination that two matching rules both point at still receives the submission once.
Who can be a recipient
Recipients are set on the destination in the dashboard and never come from the form. A _cc field in the markup is ignored, and an address has to be added and verified in workspace settings before any destination can send to it. The endpoint key sits in public HTML; if the form could name its own recipients, anyone who viewed the page source could use it to send mail to whoever they liked.
What each plan allows
- Free: one destination, email only, with one recipient. No CC or BCC and no routing rules, so every submission goes to that one address.
- Pro ($5 a month): up to 10 active destinations of any type, up to 5 To recipients per email destination, CC and BCC, and routing rules.
- Agency ($12 a month): unlimited destinations, up to 10 To recipients per email destination, CC and BCC, and routing rules.
Each workspace also has a ceiling on distinct linked email addresses, counting every To, CC and BCC once however many destinations use it: 2 on Free, 10 on Pro and 20 on Agency, with extra blocks of 25 available on the paid plans.
Which one to use
- Two or three colleagues who coordinate anyway: one message with several To addresses, accepting that Reply all reaches the visitor.
- Someone who needs a copy for the record but should stay out of the conversation: BCC.
- People who act on enquiries independently, or anyone outside your organisation: separate deliveries.
- Different people for different kinds of enquiry: routing on a field the visitor chooses from a fixed list.
- A team whose membership keeps changing: one group address, managed in your mail system rather than in the form.