Notification Emails are an easy way to keep yourself (and others) informed of any new submissions to your form. For example, you could setup a notification email for yourself that includes all of the data from a submission or you could setup a separate notification email for yourself or another team member that only includes specific data and would only be sent based on how the Form was filled out.
Note: If you're looking for more information on how to customize the email that your end-users receive after they submit a form, we'd recommend checking out our Confirmation Emails article. Otherwise, continue reading for more information on how to setup a Notification Email.
Accessing and Using Notification Emails
You can find the Emails & Actions menu under the Settings tab of your form. In this section, you can add and edit Notification Emails, add custom or default Confirmation Emails, or redirect users to an external URL or third-party integration.
Note: Notification and Confirmation Emails are only available for use on paid accounts.
Note: After changing any settings on the Emails & Actions page of your form, always make sure to hit the Save button to be sure your updates are not lost.
When a form submission is received, you can trigger a Notification Email to send to you and/or anyone on your team. This email may contain all the submitted data, a link to the saved data, or a custom message with dynamic data. You can also use Email Logic to direct emails to the proper person.
It's important to note that a Notification Email is set up automatically for each of your forms. To edit the email, disable the email, or add/edit the recipients, or trigger a test email send, click on Settings > Emails & Redirects and navigate to the Notification Email section as seen below.
By default, the Notification Email will send you all the data submitted on the form in an HTML-formatted email. You can switch to plain-text format by changing the "Message Format".
Send options
There are three different options to consider when creating your notification email. These options are to include all the submitted data, link to submitted data inside of your Formstack account or create a custom message. When choosing the customer message option, you can add your own text and drag in merge code fields to provide a dynamic message.
Custom Messages also allow you to insert field variables into a Notification Email and they will be replaced with the text that the end-user submits on that field. In the example above, the First Name and Email Address variables have been inserted into the Notification Email. The merge codes will be replaced with the data the end-user submits in those fields on the form. This is a good way to personalize emails. Any field on the form can be used in this manner.
Notification Emails are sent from noreply@formstack.com by default; however, you can edit these emails to come from a custom email address or an email address submitted on the form. The actual "From" address will still view as "noreply@formstack.com" (unless you have **SMTP configured in the Email Settings of your account), but the reply-to email address will be the custom email address. This is to avoid a practice known as "spoofing."
**Even with SMTP enabled, in order to respect the DMARC stipulations, we can no longer send Notification emails from the Email address listed on the Forms, appearing as though the Notification is coming from Submitter. This previous method of sending from Submitters was sending the email as the person in the "from" field or the Submitter, which was violating DMARC, flagging the messages and making all or some of these emails blocked or not delivered by DMARC.
Uploaded Images in Emails
If your form is integrated with a File Upload program, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3 for example, the images will not be embedded in these emails. These upload integrations only provide a URL to the preview image/page, not the file itself.
Note: If you set your email to attach files, it will only attach up to 14 MB of uploads, if the upload(s) are larger than 14 MB links will be sent instead of the actual file.
Resending Notification Emails
Once a submission has come in, you may find that in some cases you will want to resend a Notification Email to yourself or another individual on your team, or even send to another recipient outside of your Formstack account. This can be done by going to the Form > Submissions tab and then clicking on the Submission you would like to resend. Along the top of the page you will see a "Resend" button, and clicking this will allow you to enter the Notification Email recipients for this resend.
You may enter as many email addresses as you'd like in this field - all separated by commas. Resending a submission will not sign up these recipients for additional Notification Emails; rather, they will only receive this resend as a one-time execution. Additional resends can be made on other submissions by going back into the forms "Submission" menu and clicking another entry.