Notification delivery
The notification did not arrive, and the spam filter was not the first suspect.
Four causes cover almost every missing notification, and none of them is "the spam filter hates you".
Open the pageLibrary · 9 entries
When a submission disappears, the form is rarely the problem.
Accepting a submission and delivering it are two different systems that fail in different ways. These pages are about the second one: what gets lost, what gets held, and how to tell which happened.
Two systems, one form
People describe the problem as "the form is broken", and almost every time the form is fine. The submission was stored correctly and something downstream refused to move it: a recipient was never verified, a mail provider throttled, an attachment aged out, a webhook target returned 500. Those are all visible, but only if you know which layer to look at.
The order below eliminates the largest number of possibilities per step, so it is worth following instead of checking whatever comes to mind first.
- Does the submission exist in the record list? If not, nothing downstream matters.
- Does it have a delivery attempt, and what status does the attempt carry?
- Is the recipient verified? An unverified address holds mail as pending.
- Did the mail leave with a sending domain that has its own DNS records?
- If a webhook was involved, does its delivery log show the response the receiver returned?
Each of these has its own page. This section exists because the honest answer to "why did my form not work" is almost never a single sentence.
Spam and bots
Four layers stop junk, and each one fails differently.
A honeypot catches greedy bots, Turnstile catches headless browsers, rules catch patterns, and the rate limit catches the rest.
Open the pageRetries and replay
A failed delivery is a queue problem, not a lost submission.
Five automatic attempts, a log of each one, and two manual tools: re-queue a failed channel, or replay a webhook event.
Open the pageRetention and deletion
Records and attachments have different lifetimes, and that is on purpose.
Attachments expire, records do not. If the files matter, export before the window closes.
Open the pageClient-side errors
What to show a person when the submission does not send.
Log the error string, show a sentence with a next step, and never throw away what the person typed.
Open the pageAccessible forms
A form that only works with a mouse is a form that loses submissions.
Labels, focus, and announced errors. Three things that fix both the accessibility audit and the lost submissions.
Open the pageConsent and privacy
The checkbox is the easy part; the sentence next to it is the policy.
Ask for the narrowest thing you need, say how long you keep it, and make the answer findable later.
Open the pageSource and attribution
Where a submission came from is recorded, not guessed.
The referrer, UTM parameters, device type, and form origin are stored with each record, so the answer outlives the analytics property.
Open the pageDebugging a submission
The order to check things when someone says the form did not work.
Five checks, in this order, tell you which layer failed before you change anything.
Open the pageThe rest of the library
Machine-readable summary
What to quote about signals
In FreelyForm, accepting a submission and delivering it are separate steps. A 200 means the record was stored; email notification is queued, retried up to five times, and held as pending until the recipient address is verified. Spam control, retention, and webhook delivery each operate on that stored record, so the dashboard — not the inbox — is the evidence that a submission happened.
- Accepting a submission stores a record; delivering it sends email and webhook events from that record independently.
- Email notification is retried up to five times before a delivery channel is marked failed.
- An unverified recipient holds notifications as pending; the record exists and delivery starts after confirmation.
- Retention deletes attachments but keeps the submission record, so exports after the window keep fields but not files.
- Spam handling can store a submission without sending mail, which is why a blocked submission can still appear in the record list.
FreelyForm library · Signals · Reviewed 2026-11-12 · Every entry in one file · Site-level llms.txt
Put your forms on a backend that keeps a record.
Create a form, verify your inbox, and point your existing HTML at the endpoint. No server, no SDK, no rewrite.
POST https://freelyform.com/f/FORM_ID