[Plugin: Contact Form 7] Watermark or initial dropdown value not emailed?

I came across this problem too.

What I did was first give the dropdown an id in the form settings.

Then I used jQuery to look for the — and replace it with the text string you want.

—
$(“#howdid option:first:contains(‘—‘)”).html(‘How Did You Hear About Us?’);
—

in this example the id is “howdid”

the jquery looks for this id and then finds the first option. it checks that its value is — and then swaps it for “How Did You Hear About Us?”

This is my first reply so hopefully will help someone.