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Notifications

Notifications are the emails Formspring sends to you every time a form receives a clean submission. They're the fastest way to know something came in without watching the dashboard.

This is separate from the autoresponder, which emails the person who filled in the form. See Autoresponder →.

How it works

Every form has a list of notification recipients. After a submission passes the spam stack, we send each address on that list a copy with:

  • The form name in the subject.
  • All payload fields rendered as a key/value table.
  • A "View in inbox" button linking to the dashboard.
  • File attachments referenced as signed download links (15-minute TTL — they get a fresh one when they click).

Submissions that get classified as spam do not send notifications. Check the spam folder if you're missing one — see Spam →.

Configuring recipients

Open the form, then Settings → Notifications. Add one address per line:

florian@example.com
support@example.com
ops@example.com

There's no hard limit, but each address counts toward your team's monthly email quota. Pro+ plans get higher quotas.

Per-form vs global

Recipients are configured per form. There's no global "send everything to this address" setting — every form decides independently. This means:

  • Spinning up a one-off contact form on a marketing page can route to your CMO without polluting your support inbox.
  • A high-volume newsletter form can leave the recipient list empty (you'll triage from the dashboard) while still letting you keep notifications on for low-volume forms.

If you want the same set of addresses on many forms, that's a copy-paste exercise today. A team-default recipient list is on the roadmap.

Sending a test

In the notifications panel, click Send test. We send a sample email to every address on the list using fake payload values, so you can confirm:

  • The address actually receives mail (no typos).
  • It's not getting filtered into spam.
  • The rendering looks the way you want.

Test sends count toward your quota.

Suppressed emails

If an address bounces hard or marks our messages as spam, the email provider suppresses it. The address stays on your recipient list, but nothing further is delivered there until you (or that recipient) un-suppress it.

You'll see a yellow warning next to suppressed addresses in the panel. Click for details and an unsuppress action.

Workspace owners can also see and manage suppressions across the whole team at /admin/email-suppressions.

Sending stream

Notifications are sent on a transactional stream — high priority, low latency, separate from the broadcast stream we use for autoresponders. They arrive within seconds of the submission, not minutes.

If a notification fails to send (provider outage, suppressed address), we don't retry forever. Two retries with backoff, then we give up and write a notification_failed event. The submission itself is unaffected — it's still in your inbox.

Turning notifications off

Leave the recipient list empty. The form keeps accepting submissions; we just don't email anyone. Useful for high-volume forms where you'd rather poll the dashboard, or for legacy forms behind your own internal alerting.

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