Notifications

What are Notifications?

Notifications send email each time a form user completes your form. You can send information to yourself, to a list of people, or to form users.

Requirements

The Notifications feature requires a paid Formsite account.

Create a New Notification

On your form's "Notifications" page, click the "New" button. Then, choose where the Notification should send to. You can enter one or more email addresses separated by a comma, or choose an Email Address or Routing item from your form. Enable "Include form results" if you want to send a formatted copy of the form result, or "Include message" if you want to send a custom message, or you can include both. When you're finished, click the "Save" button.

Edit or Delete an Existing Notification

On your form's "Notifications" page, use the list on the right to select a Notification. Modify any settings. When you're finished, click the "Save" button. To delete a Notification, select it and click the "Delete" button.

Notification Formats

Notifications can send results in one of four formats, using "Include form results":

• Table: A two column table of question and answer pairs.
• Simplified Form: A simplified version of the form optimized for emails.
• PDF: A Table PDF or custom Results Doc (requires a Pro 2 level or higher account).
  • Table PDF is similar to Table except the table will be in an attached PDF file.
  • A Results Doc is populated and attached as a PDF or DOCX file.
• Populated Form Link: A link to view your form populated with the result.

Notifications can send a custom message by using "Include message". Messages can use Pipes to include information from form users.

Routing Items

You can use a Radio Button Email Routing item, a Dropdown Email Routing item, or a Checkbox Email Routing item as a Notification's "To" or "Reply-To". These item types are in the "Email Items" category in the list of items that can be added to your form.

When used as the "To", the Notification will be sent to each of the addresses the user selected. When used as the "Reply-To", the Notification will use the first address the user selected (an email can only have one "Reply-To").

Attaching Files

By default, the form user's files uploaded via File Upload items are shown as links to where the files have been stored in your account. You can enable the "Attach uploaded files" setting to directly attach up to 20 MB of files to the Notification email. If the files exceed the 20 MB limit, no files will be attached.

Note: Attaching files to Notifications may affect deliverability. Some organizations have strict spam filters that block files or limit the types of files that can be received. If you plan to receive a large amount of files, monitor your inbox to make sure it doesn't become full.

Conditional Logic

You can use the "Conditional logic" settings to use information from the form user to decide if a Notification should send. For example, you could have a Notification send only if a form user answered "yes" to a certain question. The Conditional Logic rules are similar to Item and Page Rules.

When a payment integration is enabled, you can also conditionally send after the result is completed, but before the user pays ("before payment attempt"), or only after a successful payment ("successful payment").

Notification Examples

The most common use of Notifications is to have your form email you a copy of each form user's result. To do this, on your form's "Notifications" page, create a new Notification, set the "To" to "Defined Addresses", and enter your email address. You can send to several email addresses by separating them with commas. If you have an Email Address item on your form, you can set the "Reply-To" to be the form user's email address.

Another common use of Notifications is to send the form user a confirmation email or auto-response. To do this, you'll need a form with an Email Address item. On your form's "Notifications" page, create a new Notification, and set the "To" to your form's Email Address item. Then, enable "Include message" and enter the message you want to send. Alternately, you can use "Include form results" to send the user a copy of their result as a receipt.

Email Limits

All of your form's Notifications combined can send up to 20 emails per result. For example, your form can have 20 Notifications that each send to 1 email address (20 × 1 = 20), 2 Notifications that each send to 10 email addresses (2 × 10 = 20), a Notification that sends to 15 email addresses and a Notification that sends to 5 email addresses (15 + 5 = 20), etc.

If your form's Notifications generate more than 20 emails for a result, only the first 20 will be sent and the rest will be ignored.

Suppressed Recipients

If you see a message on your Notification settings page that "This Notification sends to a suppressed address", you can click the "unsuppress" link to remove the address from the suppression list. If you receive a message saying you're unable to remove the suppressed address, you'll need to contact support.

Email addresses are added to the suppression list when:

1. An email to the recipient is returned due to a bounce, like when the address isn't found or blocked by the receiving email server.
2. The recipient marks a Formsite email as spam in their email program.
3. The recipient clicks the link at the bottom of the Notification labeled "click here to report unwanted email" and completes our complaint form.

To prevent unintentional filtering, we encourage Notification recipients to add "formsite.com" as a trusted sender within their organization. The easiest way to do this is to forward a Notification email to your IT department or email support people and request they set all Formsite email to bypass any inbound email filters.

Additional Information

• If you're not receiving your emails, double check your spam or junk email folder.
• You can resend your saved Notifications, or a custom one, from your form's "Results" page by using a result row's envelope icon. This will disregard any Conditional Logic the Notification may have and immediately send it. This can be helpful to resend a missed email or to forward the result to another person.
• Notifications are form-specific, there isn't a way to use information from multiple forms in the same Notification.