Contact Form 7 plugin – almost works

the simple plugin contact form will send email to my godaddy hosted email address, but when i check the inbox, i get the same email address as my “to” email (like i’m sending an email to myself).
so i cannot reply to sender who submitted the form. regardless of who sends it with any return email address.
otherwise, i can email directly to and from my new email addy. no problem. but it defeats the whole purpose of a contact form.

what am i missing?
i do not have SMTP setup or any of that.

i made no changes to the basic Contact Form 7 fields or tags.

i just got off phone with godaddy and they are useless for help.

i’ve tried connecting directly to the server to delete the previous Contact Form 7 installation files, because i thought that would fix it thru wordpress. apparently not.
anyway, i cant get through to the server now either with Fetch.
but Fetch seems to work when i connect to my other wordpress site.

thanks for any help.
i’ll be leaving for a few hours before i punch this computer.