The Bonnie Situation

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.

Privacy-first defaults IP storage is off, spam is discarded, user agent and referrer are off, and only mapped fields are stored. 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.

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.