A response worth opening.

Set up a recipient

1. Open Notifications in your workspace. A verified workspace owner or administrator can add an email address.
2. Choose Send confirmation invitation. The recipient opens the email and explicitly confirms permission. The link expires after 24 hours and works once.
3. Open a form’s Email notifications settings. Select recipients and any fields to include.
4. Save your email choices, then publish the form. Every selected recipient must be verified before publication.
5. Send a response from your website, then inspect its email history in the inbox or workspace Notifications page.

You can also open email settings from the guided setup’s Response delivery step. Return to the guide and save that step to record your review. Inbox-only remains a complete setup. No script, form markup change, or recipient is required to receive responses.

Choose what leaves the inbox

Every notification includes the form and workspace name, receipt, received time, and a private inbox link. Select which configured fields to include. Leave fields unchecked for an email without submitted field values. Values are escaped as text, shortened at 2,000 bytes per field, and bounded to 24 KB of field content per email; the inbox keeps the original accepted values.

Attachments are never included or made public by email. Opening the inbox and downloading files require a verified customer account with appropriate workspace access. Recipient permission alone grants no account or workspace access.

Permission is separate from your account

Account verification does not subscribe an address. Even the workspace owner must explicitly add and confirm a notification recipient. An address can consent separately for different workspaces. Changing a customer account email does not change an independently confirmed recipient.

Every notification includes a Stop these notifications link. Open it and confirm to stop every form in that workspace from sending to that recipient. A workspace administrator can also remove the recipient. An email already in flight cannot be recalled. Adding the address again requires fresh consent; old published versions do not automatically switch to the new recipient.

Pending confirmations count toward recipient capacity. To replace a failed or missing invitation, first check the mailbox, then remove the pending recipient and add it again. Requests are limited to 3 per address and 10 per workspace in 24 hours. Confirmation and stop links change nothing merely by being opened.

Email allowances

Free is available; paid upgrades remain coming soon. One notification to one recipient uses one email delivery. Two recipients use two. Allowances reset on the first of each month in UTC and are shared by all forms in a workspace. Webhook action allowances are separate. Confirmation, account security, and platform support emails do not consume the submission-email allowance.

The worker reserves capacity before sending. Confirmed failures release it; relay-accepted emails count once; uncertain outcomes hold capacity because the email may have been accepted. Usage shows accepted, in-progress, and uncertain totals, with a warning at 80%. Deleting a response does not refund emails already accepted or uncertain.

Reaching the email limit does not prevent responses from reaching your inbox. Affected notifications show Limit reached. An administrator can explicitly retry them when capacity is available, while their submission is retained. They are not automatically sent as an old backlog next month. After a recipient-capacity downgrade, the earliest verified recipients within the new limit remain eligible.

Understand delivery outcomes

• Queued: waiting for the worker or a scheduled retry.
• Running: an attempt is in progress.
• Accepted: the SMTP relay accepted the email. This does not prove inbox placement or reading.
• Failed: five confirmed unsuccessful attempts. An administrator can request another bounded attempt cycle.
• Outcome unknown: the email may have been accepted, or a worker stopped before saving its result. Automatic and manual resend are disabled to avoid duplicates.
• Limit reached: email or recipient capacity prevented sending.
• Canceled: the recipient, submission, or workspace became unavailable.

Confirmed failures retry after 1, 5, 15, and 60 minutes, stopping after five attempts. A permanent recipient rejection from the relay immediately pauses that recipient instead. Check the mailbox, remove the paused recipient, and request fresh consent only after correcting the issue. Delivery runs asynchronously; acceptance of a submission does not mean its email has been sent. The relay does not provide inbox/read tracking or an asynchronous bounce feed to FormBastion.

Publication, quarantine, and deletion

Saving a draft does not change live notifications. Accepted responses keep the notification configuration from their published version. Publication affects new responses only and does not send email for older responses. Quarantined responses send nothing until an authorized user releases them. A verified, active workspace owner and active subscription remain required for queued delivery.

Deleting or expiring a response removes its email delivery records and pending notifications. Deletion waits for an active send to finish. It cannot remove copies already held by a recipient or mail provider. Notification permission records remain while in use; revoked/expired records are removed after 90 days once no retained delivery refers to them.

Management API

The authenticated submission-detail response includes an email_notifications array with delivery ID, recipient ID, status, attempt count, and a safe error summary. Recipient consent and notification retry controls are managed in the customer portal. Public intake receipts contain no recipient addresses or email delivery data.

Sender and privacy

Notifications use the shared FormBastion HTML design with a complete plain-text alternative. They come from [email protected] with no Reply-To. Do not reply to a notification. Use an included sender field to contact the submitter separately when appropriate. Visitor autoresponders, custom sending domains, email attachments, and delivery/read tracking are not included.