Sending & Delivery Limits
This guide explains where your rules send from, what needs a license, and the limits that apply. These are the things most likely to trip people up on high-volume forms.
Email rules send from your Google account
When a response comes in, an email rule sends 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 these emails 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 is possible to reach that limit. After that, further emails do not 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.
Emails on an approval event are handled differently
An email rule set to only after approval or when rejected goes out from Skyfield's mail servers rather than your account, with your sender name and your reply-to address. No form submission is happening at that moment, so your account cannot send it. See Send When.
The approval request itself (the email to the approver) is still sent from your account.
Slack, Discord, Teams posts and webhooks are sent from Skyfield's servers too, so they never count against your Google sending limit.
What needs a license
| Free after the trial | Needs an active license | |
|---|---|---|
| Email rules that send on every response | Yes | |
| Email rules with an approval step (only after approval, when rejected) | Yes | |
| Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams rules | Yes | |
| Webhook rules | Yes | |
| Any rule with an approval step | Yes |
The 7-day free trial includes everything. When the trial ends without an upgrade, the paid items pause: matching submissions are logged in the history as skipped, and nothing is sent for them. Email on submit keeps sending. Upgrading resumes them for new submissions; paused ones are not sent retroactively.
In the editor, a paused rule shows Paused: needs an active license on its row, including a rule with an approval step. The paid options in the wizard carry a Paid badge while you are unlicensed.
Per-form daily cap
On top of Google's account limit, Form Notifications applies a safety cap of 500 sends per form per day, across all rules. This prevents an accidental loop or a runaway form from sending thousands of messages. Approval counts toward the same cap: a submission held for approval uses one of the 500 while it waits and after it is approved; a rejected one stops counting. It is 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 rule makes recipients (and their mail providers) more likely to treat the email as legitimate.
- On a managed Workspace domain, if recipients are not receiving emails, 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 is not 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 (for example 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 emails from your custom domain are being rejected, set up the add-on, or use Take over sending, from a personal Gmail account, so emails 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 are affected? Open an email rule and use Send test. If the test does not arrive, your recipients will not get the real emails 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 | Email rules sending from your account | Emails from forms where you are the sender cannot 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 does not, 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, emails are sent from one account, the sender shown in the editor. Another editor declining "Send email as you" on their own account does not 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 send on purpose: a rule whose only recipient is a respondent or form field that did not provide a valid address (see Recipients), a rule whose Only if conditions did not match, or a rule that is turned off. These are expected and are not failures.