About this plugin
Contact Form 7 does not store submissions: once the email is sent, the data is gone. The usual fix is to bolt on a storage add-on that keeps everything forever, including IP addresses, with no expiry. The moment a form collects personal data, that becomes unbounded risk.
The Bonnie Situation captures every Contact Form 7 submission to the database and treats stored data as a liability. It suppresses IP storage by default and automatically deletes entries after a configurable number of days, enforced by a scheduled job. Clean it up before Bonnie gets home.
What it does
- Capture every CF7 submission to a custom table, after mail handling, so it never delays or blocks your email.
- Browse, search, sort and filter submissions in a modern DataViews admin, with a per-submission detail view.
- Delete individual submissions permanently, on demand.
- Delete-only retention: suppress IP storage and automatically delete submissions after a configurable number of days — enforced daily by WP-Cron, with an audit log of every purge.
- Know when cleanup fails: if a purge fails or stops running (including WP-Cron not firing), Bonnie warns you in Site Health and with an admin notice, so data is never silently kept past your retention window.
- Subject-request tooling: integrates with WordPress’s Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data so requests by email include captured submissions.
- Import from Flamingo and CFDB7: bring existing entries across in one click, under your privacy settings and retention window — the source plugin doesn’t even need to be active.
Clean it up before Bonnie gets home.
Privacy-first defaults
IP storage is off, spam is discarded, user agent and referrer are off, CF7’s internal fields are never stored, and Contact Form 7’s own do_not_store and consent_for:storage opt-outs are honoured. The plugin provides controls that support GDPR / UK GDPR / Australian Privacy Act / CCPA compliance; lawful basis and configuration remain the site operator’s responsibility. This is not legal advice.
Bonnie Pro
This plugin is fully functional on its own: it captures submissions and enforces delete-only retention. org, adds:
- CSV / JSON export of the current view or selected rows.
- Address book of deduplicated contacts, with click-through to each contact’s submissions.
- Trash workflow — soft-delete with a restore window and a hard cap that force-deletes trashed entries, instead of the free delete-only model.
- Bulk delete across selected submissions.
- Per-form overrides — each form sets its own policy, window, IP rule and field mapping on the Contact Form 7 editor.
- IP anonymisation — store a masked address (last octet / last 80 bits) instead of the full IP.
- Encryption at rest — names, emails, subjects and form fields encrypted in the database, with the key kept in wp-config.php.
- WP-CLI — wp bonnie purge runs the retention sweep on demand, and wp bonnie import runs the Flamingo / CFDB7 import from a script.
- Failure alerts — email, Slack or webhook alerts when the scheduled cleanup fails or stops running, and a message when it recovers.
Development
Bonnie is free software (GPLv2 or later). The complete, human-readable source —
including the React admin under src/ and the build tooling — is developed in
the open:
com/nicksull/the-bonnie-situation
That repository holds the un-minified source for every shipped asset — the
js that compile to
js. Build them with
@wordpress/scripts:
npm install npm run build
org. This plugin is
fully functional without it.