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Email deliverability

If a submission landed in your inbox on Formspring but the notification email didn't arrive in your actual email inbox, one of four things is happening. Walk them in order.

1. Check the suppression list

Our transactional mail provider maintains a suppression list. Once an address bounces hard or is reported as spam, the provider won't deliver to it again until the suppression is lifted.

Open Settings → Email → Suppressions. The page lists every suppressed address and the reason:

  • HardBounce — recipient mailbox doesn't exist or rejected the message permanently
  • SpamComplaint — the recipient's mail provider reported the message as spam
  • ManualSuppression — you (or we) added it explicitly

Click Reactivate next to any address you want unsuppressed. The address will receive the next delivery attempt; if it bounces again, it's re-suppressed.

If your notification address is on the list, that's almost certainly the answer. Reactivate it and re-send a test from the form's settings page.

2. Check the form's notification email

Open the form → Settings → Notifications. The notification email field is per-form, and it's easy to leave it empty when you create a new form. If empty, no notifications send.

Set the address. Click Send test notification to verify. The test is a real notification with a placeholder payload, sent from the same template as a live submission.

3. Check spam folder + provider rules

Notifications come from info@pixelandprocess.de. Some quirks:

  • Gmail. Notifications can land in the Promotions tab if you have aggressive auto-categorisation. Drag one to Primary to teach Gmail.
  • Outlook 365. Some tenants flag templated email as junk by default. Add info@pixelandprocess.de to your safe senders list.
  • Mail filters. Many people have rules that auto-archive anything matching "form" or "submission." Check your filter list.

Check the actual spam folder, not just the inbox. We see this often.

4. DNS — you probably don't need to do anything

A common worry: "Do I need to add SPF / DKIM records?"

No. Notifications are sent from our domain (formspring.io), not from yours. We've set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on formspring.io and use shared sending infrastructure. Your DNS isn't involved.

Where DNS would matter:

  • Custom from-domain. Scale customers can send notifications from their own domain (alerts@yourcompany.com). That requires DNS records for SPF and DKIM on your domain. Setup is documented during onboarding.
  • Autoresponder reply-to. Autoresponders are sent from our domain too, but the reply-to header is set to the form's notification email. If a recipient hits reply, the response goes to you — not us. Their reply path is unaffected by your DNS.

So unless you've explicitly enabled custom-domain sending (rare, Scale-only), there are no DNS records you need to add for deliverability to work.

Bounce handling

When a notification bounces, we:

  1. Log the bounce on the team's email log
  2. Suppress the address so we don't keep trying
  3. Show a banner in the dashboard the next time the team owner logs in

Soft bounces (mailbox full, temporary issues) get retried automatically up to 3 times over 4 hours. Hard bounces (mailbox doesn't exist, domain doesn't exist) are suppressed immediately.

The email log lives at Settings → Email → Activity. It shows every notification, autoresponder, and account email sent for the team in the last 30 days, with status: delivered, bounced, opened, clicked.

Autoresponders not arriving

Autoresponders go to the submitter, not you. If a submitter says they didn't get it:

  1. Check the email log — was the autoresponder sent? Status?
  2. If delivered, ask the submitter to check spam. Common with first-time correspondents.
  3. If suppressed, the address bounced previously. You can ask them to provide a different address.
  4. If the autoresponder isn't in the log at all, the form's autoresponder is disabled or has an empty body. Check Form → Settings → Autoresponder.

Volume-based throttling

Free plan accounts are throttled at 50 notifications per day to prevent abuse. Pro+ plans have no throttling but are subject to the upstream provider's overall infrastructure limits, which we've never hit in production.

If you exceed Free's daily throttle, additional notifications are queued and delivered the next day. Submissions still land in the dashboard immediately — only the email is delayed.

Test sends

Every form's settings page has a Send test notification and Send test autoresponder button. Both send to your account email (not the form's configured notification address) with a placeholder payload. They're the fastest way to confirm the template renders correctly and your inbox isn't filtering us.

The MCP send_test_notification and send_test_autoresponder tools do the same thing from an agent.

What's next

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Spam classification
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Rate limits