The Bonnie Situation – Contact Form 7 Database & Auto-Delete

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.
• 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. Bonnie Pro, a separate add-on distributed off WordPress.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.

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:

https://github.com/nicksull/the-bonnie-situation

That repository holds the un-minified source for every shipped asset — the
React admin entry points src/index.js and src/settings.js that compile to
build/index.js and build/settings.js. Build them with
@wordpress/scripts:

npm install
npm run build

Bonnie Pro is a separate add-on, distributed off WordPress.org. This plugin is
fully functional without it.

1. Install and activate Contact Form 7 (Bonnie is an add-on for it).
2. Upload the the-bonnie-situation folder to /wp-content/plugins/, or install through the Plugins screen.
3. Activate Bonnie through the Plugins screen.
4. Visit Bonnie → Settings to choose your retention policy. Submissions are captured automatically from then on.

1. 

   Submissions list with status views, search and filtering.

2. 

   Single submission detail view.

3. 

   Privacy & Retention settings.

1.2.0

• New: import existing entries from Flamingo and CFDB7 (Settings → Import). Works with the source plugin active or deactivated, applies your privacy settings, skips spam and entries already past their retention window, and never imports the same entry twice. Source data is left untouched.
• Fix: honour Contact Form 7’s own storage opt-outs. Forms with do_not_store: true, and submissions where a consent_for:storage checkbox is left unticked, are no longer stored; values of do-not-store form tags (quiz answers, CAPTCHA) are dropped.
• Imported entries pass through the same store filters as live captures, so add-ons (encryption at rest, address book) apply to them too.

1.1.0

• Add the bonnie.settings.cards JS filter so add-ons can add their own cards to the settings screen.
• Database update: name, email, subject and user-agent columns become TEXT, and a new email_hash column supports exact-email lookups, so add-ons can store submissions encrypted. Runs automatically on update.
• Add the bonnie_email_hash filter; search and the WordPress personal-data export/erase tools find encrypted submissions by exact email.
• Encrypted values are shown as “[Encrypted]” rather than raw if the add-on that can decrypt them isn’t active.
• Add the bonnie_submission_display_ip filter so add-ons can annotate the IP shown on a submission’s detail view (display only; the stored value is unchanged).
• Upgrade links to Bonnie Pro now carry campaign tags.

1.0.0

• Initial release: capture Contact Form 7 submissions to a custom table, a DataViews submissions admin (search/sort/filter with a per-submission detail view and permanent delete), delete-only retention with a scheduled daily purge and audit log, IP-storage suppression, and WordPress Personal Data export/erase integration.