Sending & Delivery Limits
This guide explains where your notifications are sent from and the limits that apply — the things most likely to trip people up on high-volume forms.
Emails send from your Google account
When a response comes in, Form Notifications sends the notification from your own Google account — the account that set up the add-on on the form. Recipients see it as coming from your address, with the sender name you set.
Because notifications go out through your account, they count against your Google sending limit:
- Personal Gmail accounts: roughly 100 emails per day
- Google Workspace accounts: roughly 1,500 emails per day
On a busy form it's possible to reach that limit — after which further notifications won't send until it resets (about 24 hours). If you expect high volume, a Workspace account has far more headroom.
These are Google's own account limits, not a Form Notifications limit — they apply across everything that account sends.
Approval emails are handled differently
For rules that require approval, the final email to your recipients (sent after the approver signs off) comes from Skyfield's mail servers rather than your account. The approval request to the approver is still sent from your account.
Per-form daily cap
On top of Google's account limit, Form Notifications applies a safety cap of 500 notifications per form per day. This prevents an accidental loop or a runaway form from sending thousands of emails. Approval flows count toward the same cap — a submission held for approval uses one of the 500, whether it's later approved or rejected. It's well above ordinary usage — contact us if you have a genuine high-volume need.
Deliverability tips
- Set a reply-to address. A real reply-to on the notification makes recipients (and their mail providers) more likely to treat the email as legitimate.
- On a managed Workspace domain, if recipients aren't receiving notifications, your domain's email-security settings may be filtering messages sent through the add-on — ask your Google Workspace admin to confirm sending is allowed.
When your domain blocks Google-sent mail
Some organizations publish a strict DMARC policy that tells receiving mail servers to reject any message that isn't sent through the organization's own mail system. Because Form Notifications sends through Google (your account), a strict domain can cause those messages to be silently rejected — the add-on shows the send as Sent (it was handed to Google), but recipients never receive it, and no bounce is visible in the add-on.
This usually shows up on a custom-domain Workspace account (e.g. you@yourschool.org) whose domain enforces DMARC without authorizing Google as a sender. Personal Gmail addresses (@gmail.com) are always aligned and deliver normally.
How to fix it:
- Send from a Gmail account (simplest). The sender is whichever account set up the add-on on the form. If notifications from your custom domain are being rejected, set up the add-on — or use Take over sending — from a personal Gmail account, so notifications go out from an address that delivers reliably.
- Or authorize Google on your domain (admin). Ask your Google Workspace administrator to allow your domain to send through Google (an SPF / DMARC alignment change). This keeps your custom-domain address as the sender.
Not sure if you're affected? Use Send a test (in a notification's Edit menu) — if the test doesn't arrive, your recipients won't either.
Permissions you can decline (and what stops working)
When you install the add-on, Google's consent screen lets you untick individual permissions. The add-on still installs and opens — but the feature behind an unticked permission is turned off:
| Permission on the consent screen | What it powers | Without it |
|---|---|---|
| Send email as you | Sending notifications from your account | Notifications from forms where you are the sender can't be sent. The editor shows an "Email permission is turned off" warning with an Allow email sending link. |
| See, edit, create, and delete only the specific Google Drive files you use with this app | Export to Sheets on the history page (the add-on only ever touches sheets it creates) | The export button becomes Allow Drive access to export. |
To grant a declined permission, click the link in the warning (or on the export button) — it opens Google's consent screen with just the missing permission. Tick it, click Continue, and return to the add-on: the warning clears on its own within a moment. If it doesn't, use the check again button, or close and reopen the add-on from the Add-ons menu — Google occasionally needs the reload to pick up the new permission.
On a form with several editors, notifications are sent from one account — the sender shown in the editor. Another editor declining "Send email as you" on their own account doesn't affect sending; only the sender's permission matters. If the sender's permission is off, a co-editor can use Take over sending to send from their account instead.
When a send is skipped
Some submissions produce no email on purpose — for example, a rule whose only recipient is a respondent or form field that didn't provide a valid address (see Recipients), or a rule whose conditions didn't match. These are expected and aren't failures.