The template contact_form_subject.txt referenced in the documentation (both forms.txt and overview.txt) is not used in the generation of the subject header.

Proposed solution, taken from http://code.google.com/p/django-registration/

This is easy to address with subclassing, but the documentation is inconsistent. It also seems logical to handle subjects in the same way as the message itself. Here's an alternative patch that does that (the main difference from the previous patch is that cleaned_data is available for use in the subject template).

Improvement on the previous patch: also strips newlines from the subject template.

I've applied this patch and it worked fine for me.

This was fixed a while back.